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 Photo by Freilcrick llollyer. 
 
 GEORCiK MKRKDITll.
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 ^n Saeais iovoarbs ^ppveciaiion 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER JERROLD 
 
 "Life, some think, is worthy of the Muse." 
 
 3Lon&on 
 
 GREENING & COMPANY, Ltd. 
 
 20 CECIL COURT, CHARING CROSS ROAD 
 
 1902 
 
 AH Rtg^kts Reserved
 
 . 'J 
 
 
 
 TO 
 
 EDWARD CLODD 
 
 KIT FRIEND OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Man . 
 
 II. The Poet . 
 
 III, The Earlier Novels 
 
 IV. The Later Novels . 
 V. List of Works . 
 
 Index . . . . 
 
 40 
 81 
 
 139 
 
 188 
 
 193
 
 INTERNAL HARMONY 
 
 Assured of worthiness we do not dread 
 
 Competitors ; we rather give them hail 
 
 And greeting in the lists where we may fail : 
 
 Must, if we bear an aim beyond the head I 
 
 My betters are my masters : purely fed 
 
 By their sustainment I likewise shall scale 
 
 Some rocky steps between the mount and vale ; 
 
 Meanwhile the mark I have and I will wed. 
 
 So that I draw the breath of finer air, 
 
 Station is nought, nor footways laurel-strewn, 
 
 Nor rivals tightly belted for the race. 
 
 Good speed to them ! My place is here or there ; 
 
 My pride is that among them I have place : 
 
 And thus I keep this instrument in tune. 
 
 George Meredith.
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH: 
 
 AN ESSAY TOWARDS APPRECIATION 
 
 I 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 " I maintain there is wisdom in him when conven- 
 tional minds would think him at his wildest . . . the 
 man I am proudest to think of as an Englishman and a 
 man living in my time, of all men existing. I can't 
 overpraise him." Beauchamp s Career. 
 
 At no time, perhaps, have Thackeray's 
 words about the popular taste for particulars 
 as to the private life of a hero been truer 
 than at the present : " We all want to know 
 details regarding men who have achieved 
 famous feats, whether of war, or wit, or 
 eloquence, or endurance, or knowledge. 
 His one or two happy or heroic actions 
 take a man's name and memory out of the
 
 2 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 crowd of names and memories. Hence- 
 forth he stands eminent. We scan him : 
 we want to know all about him ; we walk 
 round and examine him, are curious, per- 
 haps, and think are we not as strong and 
 tall and capable as yonder champion ; were 
 we not bred as well, and could we not 
 endure the winter's cold as well as he ? Or 
 we look up with all our eyes of admira- 
 tion ; will find no fault with our hero : 
 declare his beauty and proportions perfect ; 
 his critics envious detractors, and so forth. 
 Yesterday, before he performed his feat, he 
 was nobody. Who cared about his birth- 
 place, his parentage, or the colour of his 
 hair ? To-day, by some single achieve- 
 ment, or by a series of great actions to 
 which his genius accustoms us, he is famous, 
 and antiquarians are busy finding out under 
 what schoolmaster's ferule he was educated, 
 where his grandmother was vaccinated, and 
 so forth. If half a dozen washing bills of 
 Goldsmith's were found to-morrow, would
 
 THE MAN 3 
 
 they not inspire a general interest, and be 
 
 printed in a hundred papers ? " 
 
 There is considerable truth in this, and 
 
 though we may feel that Thackeray is 
 
 lauofhincr at the extremes to which hero- 
 es & 
 
 worshippers will go in search of fresh in- 
 formation about the objects of their worship, 
 yet we know also that he recognised the 
 worthiness of the desire to know something 
 of the lives and characters of great men. 
 In commencing- his lectures on the Eno^lish 
 humorists of the eighteenth century he ex- 
 plicitly stated that it was of the men's lives 
 he would speak rather than of their books. 
 Taste in biography has somewhat de- 
 generated since the days when Thackeray 
 addressed his audiences, and now, thanks 
 to an unpleasant development of journalism, 
 no matters concerning public men and 
 women are. too trivial or too far removed from 
 the truth to be printed in certain papers, 
 and, presumably, to be avidly read by 
 a certain section of the public. To such
 
 4 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 taste it is not my wish, even if I were 
 possessed of the information, to pander. 
 Indeed, in naming this introductory portion 
 of my study of Mr Meredith's writings 
 "The Man" I am perhaps laying myself 
 open to the reproach of writing an amplified 
 "snakes in Iceland" chapter. For the 
 outside public Mr Meredith's life is but a 
 chronological record of the publication of 
 his writings ; the reference books, which 
 give us ample particulars of the lives of 
 noisy nonentities, give the scantiest informa- 
 tion about one of the greatest men of his 
 age. And all that I can pretend to give 
 here is such a compilation as is the result of 
 collecting, since first my enthusiasm for the 
 subject was awakened, any scraps of pub- 
 lished Meredithiana. 
 
 Born in Hampshire on February 12, 
 1828, George Meredith is now in his 
 seventy-fifth year. He was educated in 
 Germany — to which fact, perhaps, he owes 
 some characteristics of his literary style and
 
 THE MAN 5 
 
 something of his development as poet- 
 psychologist. 
 
 At the age of one - and - twenty Mr 
 Meredith began to study law, but pre- 
 sumably without any very fixed resolve 
 to continue in that service, for the year 
 which saw him enter upon his new studies 
 saw also the publication of his first poem ; 
 a piece by no means more remarkable than 
 many writers of a like age have produced. 
 This was entitled "Chillianwallah," and ap- 
 peared in Chambers s Journal^ July 7, 1849. 
 It is a pretty piece of commemorative 
 verse on the fatal battle of Chillianwallah, 
 when the Sikhs killed and wounded nearly 
 2400 British under Lord Gough, on January 
 13, 1849. " The fatal field of Chillianwallah 
 which patriotism prefers to call a drawn 
 battle," says the historian : — 
 
 " Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah ! 
 Where our brothers fought and bled ! 
 Oh, thy name is natural music. 
 And a dirge above the dead !
 
 6 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Though we have not been defeated, 
 
 Though we can't be overcome, 
 Still when e'er thou art repeated 
 
 I would fain that grief were dumb." 
 
 I recently noticed in an auction catalogue 
 one item which bore striking testimony to 
 the position in which Mr Meredith is 
 coming to be regarded, — the " lot " consisting 
 of the number of Chambers s Jotirnal con- 
 taining "Chillian wallah." It may be confi- 
 dently predicted that the time will come when 
 every scrap of Meredithiana will be collected 
 and treasured as zealously as any other ana 
 connected with our literature. 
 
 The law was soon abandoned for 
 journalism and literature, and in 1851 was 
 published the author's first slim volume of 
 Poems* Of the nature of the work in that 
 volume and others noted in this brief 
 record of Mr Meredith's life I shall have 
 
 * A copy of this book fetched ;^i7, 5s. at auction a few 
 years ago ; as the poet has said in Modern Love : — 
 
 " How many a thing which we cast to the ground, 
 When others pick it up becomes a gem."
 
 THE MAN 7 
 
 more to say in succeeding chapters. 
 The poems were dedicated to Thomas Love 
 Peacock, one of whose daughters — Mary 
 Ellen, widow of Lieutenant Nicholls — Mr 
 Meredith had married in 1849. At the 
 time of the publication of the volume the 
 poet was living at Weybridge in Surrey, his 
 father-in-law residing at Lower Halliford, 
 by Shepperton, on the opposite side of the 
 river. 
 
 Writing to Charles Oilier, the publisher who 
 had known Shelley, Keats and Lamb, in July 
 1 85 1, Mr Meredith spoke frankly of his ex- 
 pectations with regard to his recently-issued 
 volume, and, with the self-assurance which is 
 excusable in genius, of " better work to come." 
 " It is the appreciation you give that makes 
 Fame worth asking for ; nor would I barter 
 such communication for any amount of 
 favourable journal criticism, however much 
 it might forward the popularity and sale of 
 the book. I prepared myself, when I 
 published, to meet with injustice and slight,
 
 8 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 knowing that the little collection, or rather 
 selection, in my volume, was but the van- 
 guard of a better work to come ; and know- 
 ing, also, that the strictest criticism could 
 scarcely be more unsparing than myself on 
 the faults that are freely to be found ; know- 
 ing, lastly, that a fresh volume (of poetry) 
 is with the Press a marked book. . . . The 
 poems are all the work of extreme youth, 
 and, with some exceptions, of labour. They 
 will not live, I think, but they will serve 
 their purpose in making known my name to 
 those who look with encouragement upon 
 such earnest students of nature who are 
 determined to persevere until they obtain the 
 wisdom and inspiration and self-possession of 
 the poet." 
 
 In journalism, it is said that Mr Meredith 
 was for some time leader-writer on an East 
 Anglian newspaper — I should like to study 
 its columns — and later he contributed to 
 the Morning Post and the Pall Mall 
 Gazette. At the end of 1855 he published
 
 THE MAN 9 
 
 his marvellous addition to fantastic literature, 
 The Shaving of Shagpat, but the book was, 
 from the publisher's point of view, a failure, 
 and is said to have been sold off as a 
 " remainder." Two years later came 
 Farina, fantastic fruit of its author's sojourn 
 in Germany, and two years later again The 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, to be followed 
 (1861) by Evan Ha^'rington. Here and 
 there a voice was raised in praise of the 
 new writer, but cold neglect was for the 
 most part his lot. Mr Meredith was, how- 
 ever, winning recognition from those men 
 whose approbation it is best to win — men of 
 genius, his peers. About this time he was 
 living in a Surrey cottage near Esher, and 
 his friend, the late Sir William Hardman, in 
 contributing some chapters of reminiscences 
 to To-Day about eight years ago, had some 
 extremely interesting notes on visits to the 
 poet. One extract from his diary, undated, 
 but evidently belonging to the beginning 
 of the 'sixties, may be taken as indicating
 
 lo GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 something of the simplicity of Mr Meredith's 
 life : " We have just returned from a 
 charming little country run of two days 
 and one night. Yesterday morning we left 
 Waterloo Station at 9.15 for Esher. All 
 our mutual requirements were condensed 
 into a little black bag, which I carried, 
 and we started from the station at Esher 
 triumphantly, regardless of vehicles, for a 
 walk of two and a half miles to Copsham 
 Cottage. We were going to stay all night 
 with our good friend George Meredith. 
 The heartiest of welcomes awaited us at 
 the really humble cottage — for it makes 
 no pretensions to anything, but performs a 
 vast deal more than many great houses 
 that promise so much. Meredith is a man 
 who abhors ceremony and the convention- 
 alities ! After our first greetings were over, 
 we turned out for an hour and a half before 
 lunch. We had exhausted all our super- 
 latives in extolling the day, and the walk 
 between the station and the cottage, but
 
 THE MAN II 
 
 we had to begin again now. The scent 
 of the pine woods, the autumn tints on 
 the elms and beeches, the brihiant sun- 
 Hght exulted us to a climax of ecstasy. 
 We were children again. Luncheon on 
 our return consisted chiefly of home-made 
 products — bread, honey, jams, marmalade, 
 etc., most delicious. Then came a general 
 lighting of pipes and cigars, and off we 
 started for another walk through lanes and 
 wood to Cobham, a good six-mile business. 
 We got back at five o'clock and dined at 
 six. What appetites we had. Gracious 
 goodness ! Meredith's two other guests 
 left at eight, to walk home to Walton-on- 
 Thames, and then we put a log of wood 
 on the fire and sat down for a cosy talk. 
 Meredith read us some poems which are 
 to form part of a volume shortly to be 
 published. So passed the time till 10.30, 
 when to bed we went, thoroughly prepared 
 to sleep soundly as you may easily imagine. 
 Up at seven, and away went Meredith
 
 12 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 and myself for a brisk walk of three or 
 four miles after taking a teacup of hot 
 soup and a slice of bread. After breakfast 
 Meredith retired to work at his book of 
 poems, while we went to call on some 
 friends in the neio^hbourhood. On our 
 return he read to me the result of his 
 morning's work — portion of a very pretty 
 idyll called 'Grandfather Bridgman.'"* 
 
 The forthcoming volume was the 
 Modern Love of 1862. 
 
 At about this time Meredith was writing 
 for a striking periodical entitled Once a 
 Week, a journal which numbered among 
 its contributors, Millais, Rossetti, Leech, 
 Harriet Martineau, Mr Swinburne, and 
 other famous writers and artists. The 
 poet-novelist had won the friendship of 
 men each of whom was making his mark 
 upon the time, and in 1862 he joined some 
 
 * To-Day also contained about the same time a highly 
 interesting account of a country ramble with George Mere- 
 dith, by Sir William Hardman.
 
 THE MAN 13 
 
 of these in a memorable attempt at house- 
 keeping in common. In February of that 
 year Dante Gabriel Rossetti lost his wife, 
 and before its close he took a lease of 
 No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea; "the 
 conditions under which it was taken had," 
 says Mr Joseph Knight, " no element of 
 possible permanency. Joint occupants with 
 Rossetti were Mr Swinburne, Mr George 
 Meredith, and Mr William Rossetti. That 
 four men of individualities so potent, and, 
 in some senses, so aggressive, or at least 
 assertive, as those of the men named, should 
 be able to live together in closeness of 
 continuous intimacy, from which there was 
 scarcely an escape, was barely conceivable. 
 Mr George Meredith, accordingly, made no 
 long stay. Next after him Mr Swinburne 
 departed." * Foredoomed to failure as such 
 an experiment must have been, it was at 
 least a memorable one, and Mr George 
 Meredith's sojourn at Cheyne Walk makes 
 
 Life of Rossetti^ p. 93.
 
 14 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 yet richer the literary associations of this 
 classic ground. 
 
 The year of the Chelsea experiment also 
 saw the publication of Mr Meredith's second 
 volume of poetry, Modern Love, and Poems 
 of the English Roadside, and the frank 
 tribute of a younger poet to his elder in 
 Mr Alofernon Charles Swinburne's letter 
 of protest to the editor of the Spectator. 
 That letter may more fitly be referred to at 
 lenofth when considering- the volume which 
 called it forth ; here, however, I may point 
 out that Mr Swinburne's words sufficiently 
 show that there were people — fit but few — 
 ready to accord full homage to the genius 
 of the author of Modern Love : — 
 
 "To any fair attack Mr Meredith's books 
 of course lie as much open as another 
 man's ; indeed, standing where he does, the 
 very eminence of his post makes him per- 
 haps more liable than a man of less well- 
 earned fame to the periodical slings and 
 arrows of publicity. . . . Any work of a
 
 THE MAN 15 
 
 man who has won his spurs and fought his 
 way to a foremost place among the men 
 of his time, must claim at least a grave 
 consideration and respect. It would be 
 hardly less absurd, in remarking on a poem 
 by Mr Meredith, to omit all reference to 
 his previous work, and treat the present book 
 as if its author had never tried his hand at 
 such writing before, than to criticise the 
 L^gende des Siecles, or (coming to a nearer 
 instance) the Idylls of the King, without 
 taking into account the relative position of 
 the great English or the greater French poet. " 
 It was to be many years before any measure 
 of popularity was to be accorded to the great 
 poet and novelist, but it is gratifying to know 
 that his genius was more promptly recognised 
 by men of keener insight. It was indeed the 
 usual story — gifted astronomers are aware of 
 the comet long before we can all see it 
 
 '* Flame in the forehead of the morning sky." 
 
 In 1864 was published Emilia in Eng-
 
 1 6 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 land^ and in the following year, despite 
 the unsuccess of its original issue, a second 
 edition of The Shaving of Shagpat was 
 published as one of a series of " standard 
 editions of popular authors," with a new 
 prefatory note, and "affectionately inscribed 
 to William Hardman of Norbiton Hall."t 
 In 1865, too, came Rhoda Fleming, and in 
 the following year Vittoria ran serially 
 through the pages of the Fortnightly Review, 
 then edited by Mr John Morley. In 1867 
 this novel was published in three volumes, 
 and towards the end of the same year Mr 
 Morley set out on a visit to America, and 
 durinor his absence Mr Meredith took edi- 
 torial charge of the Fortnightly, to which 
 during the next year or two he contributed 
 critical notes on new books. 
 
 Although still some considerable degree 
 removed from anything which could be called 
 popularity, Mr Meredith's position after the 
 
 * Later renamed Sandra Belloni, under which title a 
 French translation had appeared, 
 
 t Sir William Hardman of the Mornitig Post. See p. 9.
 
 THE MAN 17 
 
 publication of Vittoria was such that all 
 his subsequent novels — with the striking 
 exception of the greatest — were originally 
 published as serials in the leading magazines 
 and reviews. From the autumn of 1870 
 until the close of 1871 The Adventures of 
 Harry Richmond were described in the 
 pages of the Cornhill Magazine, where 
 they were accompanied by illustrations by 
 George Du Maurier. Near the end of 
 1 87 1 this novel was published in the old 
 three-volume form, and a second edition 
 was almost immediately called for, showing 
 a distinct advance towards wider recoofnition. 
 Again came a long pause, for Mr Mere- 
 dith's carefully-planned, closely-thought-out 
 and brilliantly-written stories could scarcely 
 be produced at the rate of three or four a 
 year, as are those of some popular fiction- 
 manufacturers of the present day. The next 
 novel was Beauchamf s Career^ which ran 
 (1874-75) through the pages of the Fort- 
 nightly Review^ and was issued in volume form
 
 1 8 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 at the end of 1875, although dated, in accord- 
 ance with a stupid custom, the following year. 
 In 1877 Mr Meredith appeared in a new 
 role when he made his appearance — for the 
 only time, so far as I am aware — on the 
 lecture platform. This was at the London 
 Institution, where, on February i, he gave 
 his memorable discourse on the subject of 
 which he, more than any man of his age, 
 is master, that of Comedy. In the follow- 
 ing April his lecture was printed in the New 
 Quartei'ly Magazine, entitled On the Idea of 
 Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit, 
 and nearly twenty years later it was pub- 
 lished as a volume by itself. In January 
 of the same year the same magazine had 
 published one of Mr Meredith's rare short 
 stories, The House on the Beach. With the 
 exception of Farina, one of his earliest 
 essays in fiction, all the short stories be- 
 long to this period preceding the produc- 
 tion of the author's masterpiece. In July 
 1879 The Tale of Chloe appeared in the
 
 THE MAN 19 
 
 New Quarterly Magazine^ and in the follow- 
 ing autumn came — The Egoist ! 
 
 This hurried survey of Mr Meredith's 
 working life is not the place in which to en- 
 large even upon his greatest achievements, 
 but I may fairly point out here that with The 
 Egoist he made his place beyond all ques- 
 tion assured in the eyes of all true lovers 
 of the best in literature. Nor was it the 
 fault of discriminating critics if the circu- 
 lating library public still looked askance at 
 the novelist who had so quietly come to 
 the very front rank ; for Mr W. E. Henley 
 hailed the new work of genius in four reviews, 
 while James Thomson (" B.V.") was another 
 writer of great ability who let pass no op- 
 portunity of doing admiring homage to Mr 
 Meredith. In this very year which saw 
 the publication of The Egoist, ** Thomson 
 became engaged in a correspondence with 
 Mr George Meredith, for whose genius he 
 had long felt and expressed the utmost 
 admiration ; and he had now the great satis-
 
 20 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 faction of learning that his own writings 
 were held in high esteem by one whose 
 good opinion he probably valued above that 
 of any living critic. *I am glad,' wrote Mr 
 Meredith, ' to be in personal communication 
 with you. The pleasant things you have 
 written of me could not be other than agree- 
 able to a writer. I saw that you had the 
 rare deep love of literature ; rare at all times 
 and in our present congestion of matter 
 almost extinguished ; which led you to re- 
 cognise any effort to produce the worthiest. 
 But when a friend unmasked your initials, 
 I was flattered. For I had read the " City of 
 Dreadful Night," and to be praised by the 
 author of that poem would strike all men 
 able to form a judgment upon eminent 
 work as a distinction.' " * 
 
 A couple of eloquent entries in Thomson's 
 diary for 1879 may also be quoted from Mr 
 Salt's biography of the unhappy poet : — 
 
 * The Life of James Thomson (" B. V."). By H enry S. Salt. 
 Revised edition, pp. 122 123
 
 THE MAN 21 
 
 "Saturday, Nov. i. — Atkencsu77t ; o'p&ng. 
 article on Egoist. The first critique on any of 
 Georofe Meredith's books I have ever come 
 across in which the writer showed thorough 
 knowledge of his works, and anything like an 
 adequate apprec. of his wonderful genius." 
 
 "Saturday, Nov. 8. — Atkencstcm, advt. 
 of Egoist: Cordial praise from Atkenm., 
 Pall Mall, Specir., Examr. At length ! 
 Encourg. ! A man of wonderful genius, and 
 a splendid writer, may hope to obtn. some- 
 thing like recogn. after working hard for 
 thirty years, dating from his majority ! " * 
 
 In the following year Thomson spent a 
 summer day with Mr Meredith at his 
 residence, Flint Cottage, Box Hill, and de- 
 scribed the great poet and novelist as " one 
 of those personalities who need fear no com- 
 parisons with their best writings," and again 
 in September 1881, the poet of the joy of 
 earth and the poet of the sadness of cities 
 
 * The Life ofjaines Thomson (" B. V."). By Henry S. Salt. 
 Revised edition, p. 126.
 
 22 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 had a day together about the beautiful 
 downs which neighbour the creeper-clad 
 cottage that has for so many years been the 
 home of the former. The view from his 
 garden chalet Mr Meredith has wonderfully 
 pictured in the third and fourth stanzas of 
 " The Thrush in February." 
 
 During 1 880-81 The Tragic Comedians 
 appeared in the Fortnightly Review, and 
 before the close of the former year the story 
 was published separately in two volumes. 
 In 1883, after an interval of twenty years, 
 was published Mr Meredith's third volume 
 of poetry, with the title of Poems and Lyrics 
 of the Joy of Earth. Two years later, and 
 in the spring of 1885, was published that 
 novel which perhaps more than any other 
 tended to widen the circle of those familiar 
 with any of the writings of its author ; this 
 was Diana of the Crossways, and one cannot 
 help feeling that popular attention was 
 turned towards it largely because of the 
 rumours that Diana was a fictional repre-
 
 THE MAN 23 
 
 sentation of the Hon. Mrs Norton, that it 
 was in a measure a ro7nan a clef. 
 
 On September 17, 1885, Mr Meredith's 
 second wife died. 
 
 This mid-period of the 'eighties was one 
 which will long be remembered by all in- 
 terested in the great political struggle in 
 which the Irish demand for Home Rule 
 culminated. It is always interesting to 
 learn the attitude of a man such as our 
 greatest novelist towards a struggle taking 
 place among his contemporaries, and Mr 
 Meredith's sympathies are too strong, his 
 reasoning too logical, his insight too acute, 
 for him not to come to his definite conclusion 
 on such a subject as that which then tried 
 men's souls, and we learn from Mr Barry 
 O'Brien that the poet spoke with no un- 
 certain voice. As he has put it, he is half 
 Irish himself, his mother having been an 
 Irishwoman : — 
 
 " Why is not something done to inform 
 the public mind on Home Rule ? I admit the
 
 24 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 necessity of agitation, but you want some- 
 thing besides. Having blazed on the EngHsh 
 lines with the artillery of agitation, you ought 
 to charge them with the cavalry of facts." 
 
 When the great Parnell Commission was 
 in progress, a few years later, Mr Meredith 
 took the keenest interest in the proceedings 
 and frequently visited the law courts, and, 
 as Mr Justin M'Carthy has told us in his 
 Reminiscences, ** it seems almost unnecessary 
 to say that his keen intellect was not taken 
 in for a single moment by the grotesque 
 forgeries of the unhappy Pigott. As a rule 
 Meredith had no part in politics and showed 
 no desire even to enter into talk on political 
 subjects ; but he took a deep interest in the 
 progress of that extraordinary inquiry, and 
 attended the sittings of the court day after 
 day. He usually sat in one of the seats just 
 behind the leading members of the Bar ; and 
 his handsome, intellectual face caused many 
 an inquiry among those who habitually 
 attended the sittings of the court, and who
 
 THE MAN 25 
 
 never thought of seeing the secluded 
 novelist, the man known to them only by 
 the fame of his books, among the occupants 
 of the foremost benches in that court of 
 strange political investigation. More than 
 one of the leading advocates in that historic 
 trial was moved for a moment into forget- 
 fulness of the task in which he was engaged 
 by the news that George Meredith was 
 sitting just behind him." 
 
 In 1887 an article on Mr Meredith's 
 writing appeared in an American magazine, 
 and the novelist wrote a highly-interesting 
 letter to the writer of the essay, in which he 
 gave some important particulars as to his 
 method in preparing his novels. The letter 
 has been printed two or three times, but is 
 well worth reproducing again here : — 
 
 " England— Box Hill, Dorking, 
 ''July 22, 1887. 
 
 " My dear Sir, — When, at the conclusion 
 of your article on my works, you say that a 
 certain change in public taste, should it come
 
 26 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 about, will be to some extent due to me, you 
 hand me the flowering- wreath I covet. For 
 I think that all right use of life, and the one 
 secret of life, is to pave ways for the firmer 
 footing of those who succeed us ; and as to 
 my works, I know them faulty, and think 
 them of worth only where they point and aid 
 to that end. Close knowledge of our fellows, 
 discernment of the laws of existence, these 
 lead to great civilisation. I have supposed 
 that the novel, exposing and illustrating the 
 natural history of man, may help us to such 
 sustaining roadside gifts. But I have never 
 started on a novel to pursue the theory it 
 developed. The dominant idea in my mind 
 took up the characters and the story midway. 
 
 " You say that there are few scenes ? 
 Is it so throughout ? My method has been 
 to prepare my readers for a crucial exhibi- 
 tion of the personcs, and then to give the 
 scene in the fullest of the blood and brain 
 under stress of a fiery situation. 
 
 " Concerning style, thought is tough, and
 
 THE MAN 27 
 
 dealing with thought produces toughness. 
 Or when strong emotion is in tide against 
 the active mind, there is perforce confusion. 
 Have you found that scenes of simple 
 emotion or plain narrative were hard to 
 view ? When their author revised for the 
 new edition, his critical judgment approved 
 those passages. Yet you are not to imagine 
 that he holds his opinion combatively 
 against his critics. The verdict is with 
 the observer. 
 
 " In the Comedies, and here and there 
 where a concentrated presentment is in 
 design, you find a ' pitch ' considerably 
 above our common human ; and purposely, 
 for only in such a manner could so much 
 be shown. Those high notes and con- 
 densing-s are abandoned when the strono- 
 human call is heard — I beg you to under- 
 stand merely that such was my intention. 
 
 "Again, when you tell me that Harvard 
 has the works, and that Young Harvard 
 reads them, the news is of a kind to
 
 28 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 prompt me to fresh productiveness and 
 higher. In E norland I am encouragfed 
 but by a few enthusiasts. I read in a 
 critical review of some verses of mine the 
 other day that I was ' a harlequin and a 
 performer of antics.' I am accustomed to 
 that kind of writing, as our hustings orator 
 is to the dead cat and the brickbat flung 
 in his face — at which he smiles politely ; 
 and I too ; but after many years of it 
 my mind looks elsewhere. Adieu to you. 
 — Most faithfully yours, 
 
 " George Meredith." 
 
 Each year that carried the nineteenth 
 century nearer to its close saw the "few 
 enthusiasts " of whom Mr Meredith here 
 wrote considerably increased in numbers 
 if we may judge by the greater frequency 
 with which articles and notes on his 
 writings were met with in the papers, and 
 by the fact that it became less common 
 to meet fiction readers who knew nothing
 
 THE MAN 29 
 
 of the writings of one of our first masters 
 of the art of fiction. In the year in which 
 this instance of transatlantic appreciation 
 of his genius reached him, and when he 
 declared himself prompted to "fresh pro- 
 ductiveness and higher," Mr Meredith 
 published a new volume of poetry, his 
 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, and 
 towards the end of 1888 came another, A 
 Reading of Earth. 
 
 In 1888 a weekly journal named The Re- 
 flector had a brief life under the editorship of 
 the brilliant young parodist, James Kenneth 
 Stephen, who died at the early age of thirty- 
 three, a few years later. Here it is of in- 
 terest as containing a poem by Mr Meredith 
 prefaced by an amusing letter. The occa- 
 sion which called forth the letter was that, 
 in the number of the journal for January 
 29, there appeared in the advertisement 
 columns the following notice : — 
 
 "The gentleman who recently asked a
 
 30 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 younger man what the dickens he expected 
 to come to if he started in Hfe as a Tory- 
 is referred to the precedent of Mr 
 Gladstone." 
 
 In the following issue of The Reflector 
 it was made plain that the speakers referred 
 to were Mr Meredith and J. K. S., for the 
 letter which I have mentioned ran : — 
 
 " Sir, — The senior (see your advertise- 
 ment columns) who met that young Joseph 
 Hofmann of politics, with the question as 
 to the future of the youthful Tory, is 
 impressed by The Reflector s repartee, in 
 which he desires to find a very hopeful 
 promise, that may presently dispel strange 
 images of the prodigy growing onionly, and 
 showing a seedy head when one appears. 
 Meanwhile, he sends you a lyric out of many 
 addressed encouragingly to certain tramps, 
 who are friends of his, for the purpose of 
 driving a breath of the country through your
 
 THE MAN 31 
 
 pages, though he has no design of compet- 
 ing with the exquisite twitter of the triolets 
 of the French piano which accompanied 
 your birth and bids fair to sound your 
 funeral notes. — Yours, etc., 
 
 "George Meredith." 
 
 In 1892 the authors of England showed 
 their appreciation of Mr Meredith's 
 genius by selecting him to succeed Lord 
 Tennyson as President of the Incorporated 
 Society of Authors, and it is obviously fitting 
 that our greatest living master of the pen 
 should occupy the position which he does. 
 In this year he published The Empty Purse 
 and Other Poe^ns. In 1894 came Lord 
 Ormoftt and His Aminta, which ran serially 
 through the Pall Mall Magazine, and 
 a volume containing three short stories 
 which had appeared before. A year later 
 was published The Amazing Marriage, and 
 in 1896 Constable's began the issue of his 
 collected works. During this year Mr
 
 32 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Meredith gave fresh evidence of his sympathy 
 with those engaged in the struggle against 
 oppression or tyranny by subscribing to 
 the memorial to the notable Russian 
 writer and refugee, Sergius Stepniak, who 
 had recently been killed on the railway. 
 
 On February 12, 1898, Mr Meredith 
 attained his seventieth year, and his birth- 
 day was made the fitting occasion for a 
 representative body of authors to address 
 him in admiring homage : — 
 
 " To George Meredith : 
 
 " Some comrades in letters who have 
 long valued your work send you a cordial 
 greeting upon your seventieth birthday. 
 
 '* You have attained the first rank in 
 literature, after many years of inadequate 
 recognition. From first to last you have 
 been true to yourself, and have always 
 aimed at the highest mark. We are re- 
 joiced to know that merits once perceived 
 by only a few are now appreciated by a
 
 THE MAN 33 
 
 wide and steadily-growino- circle. We 
 wish you many years of life, during which 
 you may continue to do good work, 
 cheered by the consciousness of good 
 work already achieved, and encouraged 
 by the certainty of a hearty welcome from 
 many sympathetic readers. 
 
 "(Signed) J. M. Barrie, Walter Besant, 
 Augustine Birrell, James Bryce, Austin 
 Dobson, Conan Doyle, Edmund Gosse, R. B. 
 Haldane, Thomas Hardy, Frederic Harrison, 
 'John Oliver Hobbes,' Henry James, R. C. 
 Jebb, Andrew Lang, W. E. H. Lecky, M. 
 Londin, F. W. Maitland, Alice Meynell, 
 John Morley, F. W. H. Myers, James 
 Payn, Frederick Pollock, Annie Thackeray 
 Ritchie, Henry Sidgwick, Leslie Stephen, 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Mary A. 
 Ward, G. F. Watts, Theodore Watts- 
 Dunton, Wolseley." 
 
 Acknowledging this tribute, Mr Meredith 
 
 wrote in reply to Mr Leslie Stephen saying : — 
 
 C
 
 34 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 "The recognition that I have always 
 worked honestly to my best, coming from 
 the men and women of the highest dis- 
 tinction, touches me deeply. Pray let 
 it be known to them how much they en- 
 courage and support me." 
 
 In 1898 Mr Meredith's collected Poems 
 were issued, and a new volume, Odes in 
 Contribution to the Song of French History, 
 was published, then in the spring of 1901 
 A Reading of Life, with Other Poems^ first 
 delighted his admirers and proved that 
 inspiration still comes to the honoured 
 veteran, and that despite ill health his 
 fancy is as quick, his intellect as keen as 
 ever. 
 
 In the summer of 1900 several mem- 
 bers of the White Friars Club visited 
 Mr Meredith at Flint Cottage, and one of 
 their number sent to the Westminster 
 Gazette a note on the event, from which a 
 passage may be borrowed, giving as it
 
 THE MAN 35 
 
 does a lively idea of the great poet-novelist 
 at home : — 
 
 " Despite his physical feebleness, Mr 
 Meredith, who was accompanied by his 
 charming daughter, advanced to meet his 
 guests, as, despite protest, he saw them 
 to his outer gate at the close of the visit. 
 While in dress and spirits Mr Meredith 
 half suggested the Frenchman, in the liveli- 
 ness of his wit and the sunniness of his 
 reception he proved the truth of an 
 observation he let fall as to the Irish — 
 ' above all,' he remarked, ' they have 
 charming manners ' — for in welcoming a 
 popular writer (* He hath Irish in his eye ! ' 
 he exclaimed) he explained that he was 
 half Irish, his mother being Irish. One 
 or two visitors, having Mr Meredith's 
 intricacies of style vividly fixed in their 
 minds, had gone as to the sight of a quarry 
 of Northern granite ; all quit with slow- 
 foot as if they were closing a happy 
 holiday on the Riviera. His courtliness,
 
 36 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 his ' instinctive keen glance,' the amazing 
 brightness of his conversation, the flood- 
 like flow of his language, his jocosity, his 
 almost boyish joyousness — in short, the 
 exceptional personal charm and ' rattle ' 
 of the man — made captive all hearts. Mr 
 Meredith, as well as his daughter, was 
 unmistakably touched by the homage of 
 his visitors ; while the White Friars, in 
 their turn, departed lingeringly, as one 
 glances back again and again upon a 
 beautiful scene or a fascinating figure 
 — in this instance beautiful scene and 
 fascinating figure being in combination, 
 the exceptional reluctance to return to 
 the normal outlook upon average people 
 and ordinary scenes needed no excuse : 
 ' for to the remembrance it seemed 
 magical.' " 
 
 I cannot conclude this chapter better than 
 by giving from the pen of a distinguished 
 novelist and politician some passages de-
 
 THE MAN 37 
 
 scriptive of the personal impression made 
 upon him by Mr Meredith. The passages 
 are from the entertaining Re77iiniscences of 
 Mr Justin McCarthy, and give a picture of 
 the great writer not unHke that which we 
 conjure up from a knowledge of him through 
 his works. " I think the first impression 
 which George Meredith made on me " (wrote 
 Mr McCarthy) *' was that of extraordinary 
 and exuberant vitality. When I saw him 
 for the first time, he had left his younger 
 days a long way behind him, and yet he 
 had the appearance and movements of one 
 endowed with a youth that could not fade ; 
 energy was in every movement ; vital power 
 spoke in every gesture. He loved bodily 
 exercises of all kinds ; he delighted to take 
 long brisk walks — 'spins,' as he called them 
 — along the highways and byways of the 
 neighbourhood ; and he loved to wander 
 through the woods, and to lie in the grass, 
 and I have no doubt he would have enjoyed 
 climbing the trees. He seemed to have in
 
 3^ GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 him much of the temperament of the faun ; 
 he seemed to have sprung from the very 
 bosom of Nature herself. His talk was 
 wonderful, and, perhaps, not the least 
 wonderful thing about it was that it 
 seemed so very like his writing. . , . 
 Meredith, as I have said, loved all manner 
 of bodily exercises ; and, indeed, it amazed 
 me when I first used to visit him, to see 
 a man, no longer young, indulge in such 
 feats of strength and agility. It delighted 
 him to play with great iron weights, and to 
 throw heavy clubs into the air and catch 
 them as they fell, and twirl them round 
 his head as if they had been light bamboo 
 canes. I remember wondering, indeed, 
 sometimes, whether such exercises and 
 such feats of strength were not taxing too 
 far the physical powers of a man who had 
 already passed his prime, and whether 
 over-taxed Nature would not show some 
 day that she had been taxed too far. 
 But at the same time, the general im-
 
 THE MAN 39 
 
 pression which George Meredith then gave 
 one was that of the faun-like creature, 
 the child of Nature who must always be 
 young."
 
 1 1 
 
 THE POET 
 
 "Enter these enchanted woods 
 You who dare." 
 
 The Woods of Westermam. 
 
 On one occasion when hotly championing 
 the cause of Mr Meredith in a brief after- 
 dinner discussion on living novelists, now 
 some years ago — a discussion in which I felt 
 that his merits were receiving far from their 
 due share of attention — I happened to say 
 that he was none the less great as a novelist 
 for being great as a poet, when the "funny 
 man " of the gathering chimed in with, 
 " Perhaps that is why we can't understand 
 him." The remark was received with some 
 applause by those who preferred the simple 
 
 sensationalism — religious, amatory, or bloody 
 
 40
 
 THE rOET 41 
 
 — of the approved circulating library fiction 
 to the life-revealing, thought- packed, wit- 
 irradiated work of the author of The 
 Egoist ; and it was not only applauded, 
 but really seemed to some of those present 
 to be a sufficiently adequate explanation of 
 Meredithian "difficulty" — the highest 
 poetry being commonly distasteful and 
 therefore "difficult" reading. 
 
 That the novelist is poet also is manifested 
 in almost everything which he has written, 
 but in this chapter I wish to touch upon the 
 poetry which he has given to us in more or 
 less orthodox approved poetic forms, — where 
 the poet has shaped the language as well as 
 conceived the thought. And here it may be 
 noted that Mr Meredith has written of him- 
 self " as one loving poetry wherever I can 
 find it, and of any kind," and again — 
 
 "To light and song my yearning aimed." 
 
 I begin my appreciation by a consideration 
 of the poetry, then, because it seems to me
 
 42 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 that it is perhaps the most characteristic 
 expressions of George Meredith's genius, in 
 which we have at once his marvellous sense 
 of the beautiful — and his still more wonder- 
 ful power of interpreting it — his rapidity 
 of intellectual insight and his remarkable 
 capacity for subjecting language to thought. 
 Chronologically, too, the poetry demands 
 attention first, for, as I have pointed out in 
 the preceding chapter, it was as poet that 
 Mr Meredith first made his appearance in 
 print over fifty years ago, when he con- 
 tributed " Chillianwallah " to Chambers s 
 Journal in July 1849. His earliest volume, 
 too, published a couple of years later, was 
 Poems. 
 
 In setting at the head of this chapter the 
 two opening lines of " The Woods of Wester- 
 main," I am thinking of the way in which 
 that remarkable poem may be wrested to a 
 symbolical meaning, as indicating some of 
 the best work of its author. Take up the 
 two volumes of the collected Poems, and
 
 THE POET 43 
 
 you may at once enter Poetry's own woods 
 of Westermain : — 
 
 " You with them may gather ripe 
 Pleasures flowing not from purse. 
 Quick and far as Colour flies 
 Taking the delighted eyes, 
 You of any well that springs 
 May unfold the heaven of things ; 
 Have it homely and within, 
 And thereof its likeness win. 
 Will you so in soul's desire : 
 This do sages grant t' the lyre." 
 
 The thought expressed in the penultimate 
 Hne of that passage is repeated later on in 
 the same poem when the poet declares — 
 and it is as true in the realm of poetry as 
 in that of nature — 
 
 "Burn to see, you need but seek." 
 
 The eye sees that which it brings with it 
 the power of seeing, said Goethe, and most 
 assuredly the mind, capable of recognising 
 the beauties of thought, crystallised in the 
 language of poetry, will find a plenitude of 
 them in the two volumes with which I am
 
 44 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 here mainly concerned. I say the two 
 volumes because it is in the collected Poems 
 published in 1898 that most readers will 
 make acquaintance with this side of Mr 
 Meredith's work. For the collector, or for 
 those discerning lovers of what is good in 
 literature who acquired them as they were 
 issued, there are several slim volumes 
 published since the original volume of 1851. 
 The greater parts of these are embodied in 
 the collected PoetJts. Those pieces which 
 the author has seen fit to reject, or has 
 not chosen to collect, may yet, it is to be 
 hoped, be gathered into a third volume. 
 
 It is not my intention to go through the 
 riches of these two books sei'iatim, apprais- 
 ing and comparing or roughly classifying 
 them ; nor do I aspire to join the ranks 
 of the mere cataloguers who briefly mention 
 piece after piece with a few lines to each as 
 though they were preparing a catalogue for 
 use in the hall of Fame. I wish rather to 
 insist upon some of the more striking
 
 THE POET 45 
 
 characteristics of Mr Meredith's poetry, 
 and to show by extracted gems — but roughly 
 set in the contrasting medium of my dull 
 prose — how great a store of riches is here 
 at the command of all who can brinsf to their 
 reading the power of appreciating that which 
 is most precious in literature. In doing 
 this I may be running counter to some 
 accepted ideas in the province of criti- 
 cism, for exposition, Mr John Morley has 
 declared, is not wanted for well - known 
 living writers ; such generalisation is, how- 
 ever, untrue when it comes to the case of 
 a well-known writer who is only partially 
 understood, and therefore but inadequately 
 appreciated. Some of Robert Browning's 
 work, for example, certainly needed ex- 
 position during the poet's lifetime simply 
 because too many people were ready to 
 neMect his work altoo^ether on the grround 
 that some of it deserved to be labelled " hard 
 reading." Precisely the same thing applies 
 in the case of the subject of this volume.
 
 46 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Here is a poet who has written of man 
 and of nature with extraordinary insight 
 and with an almost unique power of expres- 
 sion, the whole of whose work is made to 
 suffer in the minds of all too many readers 
 because some of his poems are " difficult 
 readinof." We miofht as well refuse to read 
 Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet because we can- 
 not fathom all the secrets of the Sonnets, or 
 Pippa Passes because bothered by Sordello^ 
 as ignore four-fifths of Mr Meredith's poetry 
 because of the difficulty of the rest. 
 
 In his collected Poems Mr Meredith has 
 not unwisely placed first his Modern Love, 
 his most sustained poetic achievement and 
 one that of itself would suffice to place him 
 among the masters of his time. Modern 
 Love is a sequence of fifty sixteen-line poems 
 which are sonnets in everything but the fact 
 of their extension by one-seventh beyond 
 the "scanty plot of ground" allotted by use 
 and wont to the sonnet. Their spirit is, 
 however, so essentially that of the sonnet
 
 THE POET 47 
 
 that we may throw mere conventionalism 
 to the winds and boldly call them such. 
 The boldness of this — although it is but 
 following in the steps of no less doughty a 
 pioneer than Mr Algernon Charles Swin- 
 burne — will be the more apparent when it 
 becomes necessary to place Modern Love 
 among the world's great sonnet sequences. 
 Modern Love has a more or less definite 
 story to tell and may be described as a novel 
 taken up at the point where a prose fictionist 
 generally leaves off. It is tragic in its deep 
 intensity, and has cleverly been described by 
 James Thomson (B.V.) as "a series of Rem- 
 brandt etchings for sombre intensity and 
 concision." Unlike the novels by the same 
 author, which so often open with a more or 
 less involved introduction, the poem begins 
 abruptly : — 
 
 " By this he knew she wept with waking eyes : 
 That, at his hand's Ught quiver by her head, 
 The strange low sobs that shook their common bed. 
 Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
 
 48 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, 
 Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay 
 Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away 
 With muflfled pulses. Then, as midnight makes 
 Her giant heart of Memory and Tears 
 Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat 
 Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet 
 Were moveless, looking through their dead black years 
 By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall. 
 Like sculptured effigies they might be seen 
 Upon their marriage tomb, the sword between ; 
 Each wishing for the sword that severs all." 
 
 The story is one of soul-tragedy : — • 
 
 " In tragic life, God wot. 
 No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot." 
 
 The husband believes the love of his 
 wife to be alienated from him, and yet while 
 eating his heart out with jealousy and pain 
 cannot but still love where he has loved — 
 
 " Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask." 
 
 Everything reminds the man of what has 
 been and makes him feel more poignantly 
 the horror of what is, his varying moods
 
 THE POET 4t, 
 
 and thoughts being finely translated in the 
 poems. Then we have the twentieth sonnet 
 with its striking opening : — 
 
 " I am not of those miserable males 
 Who sniff at vice, and, daring not to snap. 
 Do therefore hope for heaven," 
 
 and its notable close when the husband 
 finds an old "wanton scented-tress," and, 
 comparing his own past with his wife's 
 present, says — 
 
 " If for those times I must ask charity, 
 Have I not any charity to give ? " 
 
 So they go on "league -sundered by the 
 silent gulf between," their task made 
 the heavier by the fact that friends will 
 look upon them as the very embodiment 
 of wedded love — they are asked for their 
 blessing on a pair about to venture upon 
 the seas of matrimony, and visiting at a 
 crowded country house, they 
 
 " can but get 
 An attic-crib. Such lovers will not fret 
 At that, it is half said." 
 D
 
 5b GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 With the twenty-fifth sonnet comes a cap- 
 ital stroke. She has been reading a French 
 novel and dislikes it as unnatural. Why ? 
 he asks ; the story is of " the usual three, 
 husband, and wife, and lover," and when 
 it comes to a final choice, 
 
 " She does choose ; 
 And takes her husband, like a proper wife. 
 Unnatural ? My dear, these things are life : 
 And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse." 
 
 Sick at heart he visits his doctor, and 
 the oracle of medicine prescribes distrac- 
 tion ; love denied him at home, he seeks a 
 mistress and finds disillusionment again : — 
 
 *' A kiss is but a kiss now ! and no wave 
 Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. 
 But, as you will ! we'll sit contentedly, 
 And eat our pot of honey on the grave." 
 
 The differentiation of kisses here is unfor- 
 gettable ; the lines are instinct with genius. 
 He wakes one morning to find her gone.
 
 THE POET 51 
 
 "Then I rose, 
 And my disordered brain did guide my foot 
 To that old wood where our first love-salute 
 Was interchanged." 
 
 He finds her there with another, but goes 
 up and proffers his arm. 
 
 "She took it simply, with no rude alarm ; 
 And that disturbing shadow passed reproved." 
 
 Then comes " the pure daylight of honest 
 speech," and he learns that she too has been 
 jealous of his love for another : — 
 
 " Jealous devotion bade her break the mesh, 
 That I might seek that other like a bird." 
 
 And so we come to an end of the 
 sequence with a sonnet, the closing lines 
 of which are magnificently descriptive of 
 the sea : — 
 
 "Thus piteously Love closed what he begat : 
 The union of this ever-diverse pair ! 
 These two were rapid falcons in a snare, 
 Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.
 
 52 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, 
 They wandered once ; clear as the dew on flowers : 
 But they fed not on the advancing hours : 
 Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. 
 Then each applied to each that fatal knife, 
 Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. 
 Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul 
 When hot for certainties in this our life ! — 
 In tragic hints here see what evermore 
 Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, 
 Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
 To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! " 
 
 There is something particularly sad in 
 the dominating thought of " this great 
 processional poem " (as Mr Swinburne has 
 called it) — the thought that two who love, 
 and love deeply, may yet be fatally severed 
 by the very intensity of their passion 
 and their inability to "speak out," The 
 tragedy is probably a commoner one than 
 most people would care to admit, and 
 in recording it Mr Meredith has had the 
 opportunity of uttering some of the finest 
 things in modern poetry. Each part of 
 the great processional is essentially a
 
 THE POET 53 
 
 sonnet in its self-contained thought and 
 beauty, and though technically it cannot 
 be called a sonnet sequence we find our- 
 selves insensibly ranging it with such noble 
 work as Rossetti's House of Life, although 
 the styles of the two poets are widely 
 different. It has indeed been said by one 
 critic * — and many lovers of poetry will 
 agree with him — that these two sequences 
 are " among the very finest legacies of 
 poetic genius left to us in the latter half 
 of the nineteenth century." 
 
 In the very same year that saw the 
 publication of the tragic Modern Love a 
 widely different poet was working on the 
 same theme and was treating it from a 
 widely different standpoint. The poet was 
 Henrik Ibsen and the work was the 
 Comedy of Love, wherein the author 
 bitterly satirised the subject of marriage 
 for love : — 
 
 * Mr William Sharp in an article in Good Words, July 
 1899.
 
 54 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 "Use your experience ; look around in life — 
 Each pair of lovers takes for creed and psalter 
 That millions came to them as man and wife. 
 They gallop harum scarum to the altar ; 
 They make a home, spoiled pets of happiness 
 A space goes by in faith-intoxication ; 
 At length a day of reckoning dawns ! ah ! yes 
 And proves mere bankruptcy their jubilation. 
 Bankrupt the flower of youth on matron's cheek ; 
 Bankrupt the bloom of thought within her mind ; 
 Bankrupt the husband's courage ; tame and meek 
 Each flame that once flew blazing on the wind ; 
 Bankrupt the whole condition of affairs, 
 Yet still they're quoted on the Bourse of pairs, 
 A first-class firm of love, the best you'll find." * 
 
 The last two lines remind us irresistibly 
 of the couple in Modern Love who, " league- 
 sundered by the silent gulf between," are 
 yet spoken of by their friends as the very 
 embodiment of wedded love. 
 
 The art of the pen, Mr Meredith has 
 finely said, " is to arouse the inward 
 vision, instead of labouring with a drop- 
 scene brush, as if it were to the eye ; 
 
 * As Englished by Mr Edmund Gosse.
 
 THE POET 55 
 
 because our flying minds cannot contain a 
 protracted description. That is why the 
 poets who spring imagination with a word 
 or a phrase paint lasting pictures." This 
 springing the imagination with a word or 
 phrase is just what the poet of Modern 
 Love does with such marvellous sureness. 
 If we turn to his other poems we find the 
 same flashing insight exercised in regard 
 to other human relations, as we have in 
 this sequence on the doubting married 
 lovers. He has a lesson to read to his 
 country as a whole — a country that he fears 
 may drift to ruin in a state of drunkenness — 
 the drunkenness that comes of wealth. This 
 lesson he gives in " Aneurin' s Harp," one of 
 the stirring Ballads and Poems of Tragic 
 Life, and it is shrewdly put in the three 
 closing stanzas : — 
 
 "Joined we are; a tide of races 
 Rolled to meet a common fate ; 
 England clasps in her embraces 
 Many: what is England's state?
 
 56 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 England her distended middle 
 Thumps with pride as Mammon's wife ; 
 Says that thus she reads thy riddle, 
 Heaven ! 'tis heaven to plump her life. 
 O my Bard ! a yellow liquor, 
 Like to that we drank of old — 
 Gold is her metheglin beaker, 
 She destruction drinks in gold. 
 Warn her, Bard, that Power is pressing 
 Hotly for his dues this hour ; 
 Tell her that no drunken blessing 
 Stops the onward march of Power. 
 
 Has she ears to take forewarnings 
 She will cleanse her of her stains, 
 Feed and speed for braver mornings 
 Valorously the growth of brains. 
 Power, the hard man knit for action, 
 Reads each nation on the brow. 
 Cripple, fool, and petrifaction, 
 Fall to him — are falling now ! " 
 
 Perhaps the poet thinks that it is with 
 the nation as with the man : — 
 
 " We spend our lives in learning pilotage. 
 And grow good steersmen when the vessel's crank ! " 
 
 " Necessity," as he has said in another 
 poem, "is the primal goad to growth."
 
 THE POET 57 
 
 It is to the poets that we go for such 
 comfort as the words and thoughts of 
 others can orive us when vexed and torn 
 by the world-long problems of whence 
 and whither, and by the sorrow of loss ; 
 most of the greater poets can give hope 
 and sustainment when our faith is on 
 trial, even though it be but in the magni- 
 ficent defiant egotism of Mr Henley's : — 
 
 " Out of the night that covers me, 
 Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul." 
 
 When we turn to Mr Meredith's utter- 
 ances we find an optimism no less ex- 
 hilarating, if slightly reminiscent of George 
 Eliot's "Choir Invisible" in "The Question 
 Whither,"— 
 
 "When we have thrown off this old suit, 
 So much in need of mending, 
 To sink among the naked mute. 
 Is that, think you, our ending ?
 
 58 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 We follow many, more we lead, 
 
 And you who sadly turf us, 
 Believe not that all living seed 
 
 Must flower above the surface. 
 
 Enough if we have winked to sun, 
 
 Have sped the plough a season ; 
 There is a soul for labour done, 
 
 Endureth fixed as reason. 
 Then let our trust be firm in Good. 
 
 Though we be of the fasting ; 
 Our questions are a mortal brood. 
 
 Our work is everlasting. . . ." 
 
 Then, too, there is in A Reading of 
 Earth that beautiful utterance of poignant 
 grief, " A Faith on Trial " a poem full of 
 such consolation as man can offer to man 
 in his most trying hour and full of that 
 sense of our oneness with nature which 
 runs through so much of Mr Meredith's 
 poetry. Here again and again will be 
 found words and phrases calculated to 
 "spring imagination," and through all a 
 sense of personal intimacy that seems to 
 make it sacrilege to tear any of the lines
 
 THE POET 59 
 
 from their context. The openinf^ passage 
 sufficiently points the autobiographical 
 character of the poem : — 
 
 " On the morning of May, 
 Ere the children had entered my gate 
 With their wreaths and mechanical lay, 
 A metal ding-dong of the date ! 
 I mounted our hill, bearing heart 
 That had little of life save its weight : 
 The crowned Shadow poising dart 
 Hung over her : she, my own. 
 My good companion, mate. 
 Pulse of me : she who had shown 
 Fortitude quiet as Earth's 
 At the shedding of leaves." 
 
 The poem is instinct with beauty 
 throughout and contains in the passage 
 on "the pure wild cherry in bloom" one 
 of the sweetest word pictures in the 
 language. We may call the poem panthe- 
 istic in its glorification of the Earth and 
 all that is hers, we may not feel the 
 sustainment which the poet felt in his 
 sublim.e " reading," but if we have eyes
 
 6o GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 and ears for beauty, if we have minds 
 capable of appreciating creation by words, 
 we cannot fail to recognise in "A Faith 
 on Trial " one of the highest poetic expres- 
 sions made by that unorthodox faith which 
 the orthodox call doubt. 
 
 There is so much of a fine indication 
 of the subtle influence of nature on a 
 sensitive poetical mind in this poem that 
 it is only fitting to follow up mention of 
 it with a few words on Mr Meredith's 
 nature poetry generally, and this same 
 nature poetry is one of the most marked 
 characteristics of the whole body of his 
 work. 
 
 " No Paradise is lost for them 
 Who foot by branching root and stem 
 And lightly with the woodland share 
 The change of night and day." 
 
 A sense of the beauty and significance 
 of our natural surroundings is largely a 
 development of the nineteenth century — 
 or at least a reversion to what obtained
 
 THE POET 6i 
 
 before the formal fashions of the eig^hteenth 
 century. Here periods are of course 
 but loosely named, for the real renas- 
 cence of nature poetry began before the 
 nineteenth century, as may be witnessed 
 most strongly in the works of Cowper 
 and of Burns. Still, its true development 
 followed them, until every later poet of 
 distinction has treated man more or less 
 in relation to nature as a whole and not 
 as a kind of extravagance set amid wholly 
 alien surroundings on an earth with which 
 he has no real and intimate connection. 
 With the fuller recognition of man's position 
 as part of nature has come a fuller sense 
 of the beauty of other natural manifestations, 
 and that sense has never better been put 
 in words than in certain passages in the 
 poetry of Mr Meredith. 
 
 Take, for example, that most joyous poem 
 to "The Lark Ascendino." Wonderful 
 always in the felicity of his metre and 
 language as a nature poet, in this piece
 
 62 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Mr Meredith has contributed to the world's 
 Hterature a veritable triumph of wedded 
 language and thought. We are not so 
 much reading the poem as experiencing in 
 our inner consciousness the very song of 
 the crested singer as he rises tremulously 
 up and up, 
 
 " Till lost on his aerial rings 
 In light." 
 
 The rush of thought and music — now half 
 pausing and then on again full, rich and 
 
 "on the jet sustained 
 Without a break, without a fall, 
 Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical," 
 
 is the most marvellous adaptation of 
 language to natural music that I know ; far, 
 far more remarkable, because at once so 
 much more spontaneous and so much more 
 sustained, than Tennyson's better - known 
 ■* Throstle Song." It is almost impossible to 
 read the poem without reading it aloud, 
 and to read it aloud is at once to feel the
 
 The poet 63 
 
 magic of it, even though the voice gives 
 out before the end of the first stopless 
 stanza of over sixty Hnes. In that opening 
 passage, by the way, occurs a striking 
 metaphor, giving evidence of the acutest 
 observation : — 
 
 " And every face to watch him raised, 
 Puts on the light of children praised." 
 
 Nothing but a lengthy extract can give 
 a hint of the quahty on which I have laid 
 such stress, and this extract shall be the 
 following beautiful summing-up of the joy 
 of the lark's song : — 
 
 "For singing till his heaven fills, 
 'Tis love of earth that he instils, 
 And ever winging up and up, 
 Our valley is his golden cup. 
 And he the wine which overflows 
 To lift us with him as he goes : 
 The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine, 
 He is, the hills, the human line. 
 The meadows green, the fallows brown. 
 The dreams of labour in the town j
 
 64 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 He sings the sap, the quickened veins ; 
 The wedding song of sun and rains 
 He is, the dance of children, thanks 
 Of sowers, shouts of primrose-banks. 
 And eye of violets while they breathe ; 
 All these the circling song will wreathe, 
 And you shall hear the herb and tree, 
 The bitter heart of men shall see, 
 Shall feel celestially, as long 
 As you crave nothing save the song. 
 
 Was never voice of ours could say 
 Our inmost in the sweetest way, 
 Like yonder voice aloft, and link 
 All hearers in the song they drink. 
 Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, 
 Our passion is too full in flood. 
 We want the key of his wild note 
 Of truthful in a tuneful throat, 
 The song seraphically free 
 Of taint of personality. 
 So pure that it salutes the suns 
 The voice of one for millions, 
 In whom the millions rejoice 
 For giving their one spirit voice." 
 
 Shelley's magnificent lyric " To a Skylark," 
 with all its joyous exultation, is not greater 
 than this to "The Lark Ascending." Then,
 
 THE POET 65 
 
 too, in another poem, strongly contrasting 
 in its theme with that which I have just 
 instanced, we have the poet singing of the 
 value of " Hard Weather " as a tonic force. 
 The poem may be described as being in 
 parts "hard reading," but the fineness of 
 many of its descriptive passages, the whole- 
 someness of its teaching are beyond all 
 question. It is bracing and invigorating, and 
 is indeed a fine setting in words of what 
 is commonly described as having the 
 cobwebs blown out of us ; it is fitting that 
 we should wrestle with elemental force at 
 times, that we should breast the biting 
 wind and, struggling against it, feel the 
 better for the encounter : — 
 
 " Behold the Hfe at ease ; it drifts. 
 The sharpened hfe commands its course." 
 
 And again towards the end of the poem 
 we have a suggestion of the theory of the 
 survival of the most fit : — 
 
 " Earth yields the milk, but all her mind 
 Is vowed to thresh for finer stock."
 
 66 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Throuofh these two volumes it is the same 
 over and over again ; the poet is Hke the 
 Daughter of Hades of his own poem : — 
 
 " Of the glory of Light she sang, 
 She sang of the rapture of Breath," 
 
 Man is not foreign to but part of nature 
 
 and with his higher attributes should 
 
 certainly be no less spontaneously happy 
 
 than the animals and plants which he is 
 
 prone to look down upon. Life is not a 
 
 trial and a journey, but a manifestation 
 
 of happiness in its very possession. We 
 
 are too self-centred, too neglectful of all 
 
 other forms of life, except in so far as they 
 
 subserve our grosser needs, and we pay the 
 
 penalty : — 
 
 " Never in woods 
 Ran white insanity fleeing itself : all sane 
 The woods revolve." 
 
 Which reminds us of a famous passage 
 in Walt Whitman. 
 
 But again the poet's lesson rings true,
 
 THE POET 67 
 
 you must learn to see before you can see ; 
 before you can in the smallest degree walk 
 the earth with the observing eye, the 
 assimilative soul of the poet or of that 
 " Melampus " of whom he says : — 
 
 " With love exceeding a simple love of the things 
 
 That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck ; 
 Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings 
 
 From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck ; 
 Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball ; 
 
 Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook ; 
 The good physician Melampus, loving them all, 
 
 Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. 
 
 For him the woods were a home and gave him the key 
 
 Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and 
 flowers. 
 The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we 
 
 To earth he sought, and the link of their life with 
 ours : 
 And where alike we are, unlike where, and the veined 
 
 Division, veined parallel, of a blood that flows 
 In them, in us, from the source by man unattained 
 
 Save marks he well what the mystical woods disclose." 
 
 Well would it be if doubting humanity 
 would better take to heart the lesson
 
 68 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 which the poet so clearly transcribes from 
 the woodland he knows and loves so 
 thoroughly : — 
 
 " And this the woodland saith : 
 I know not hope or fear ; 
 I take whate'er may come ; 
 I raise my head to aspects fair, 
 From foul I turn away." 
 
 But enough of man's oneness with nature 
 — a theme on which Mr Meredith has much 
 to say in all his poetry but chiefly in that 
 fascinating series of poems which were 
 originally published under the title of A 
 Reading of Earth. The teaching, if it is to 
 be summed up in a word which is never a 
 very satisfactory procedure, may be described 
 as a kind of hedonistic-pantheism — the 
 pleasure which comes of knowing Nature 
 intimately and of realising our oneness with 
 her. There is another aspect of Mr Mere- 
 dith's poetry of nature which also calls for 
 more than passing comment. It is his 
 remarkable faculty for describing natural
 
 THE POET 69 
 
 effects. Take the second and third stanzas 
 of "The Appeasement of Demeter," de- 
 scribing a state of famine, when 
 
 " Demeter devastated our good land, 
 In blackness for her daughter snatched below. . . . 
 
 Necessity, the primal goad to growth, 
 Stood shrunken ; Youth and Age appeared as one ; 
 Like Winter Summer ; good as labour sloth ; 
 Nor was there answer wherefore beamed the sun, 
 Or why men drew the breath to carry pain. 
 High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain. 
 
 Idly the flax-wheel spun 
 Unridered : starving lords were wasp and moth. 
 
 Lean grassblades losing green on their bent flags, 
 Sang chilly to themselves; lone honey-bees 
 Pursued the flowers that were not with dry bags ; 
 Sole sound aloud the snap of sapless trees. 
 More sharp than slingstones on hard breastplates hurled. 
 Back to first chaos tumbled the stopped world, 
 
 Careless to lure or please. 
 A nature of gaunt ribs, an Earth of crags." 
 
 The effect of famine and devastation is 
 heiofhtened in succeeding^ stanzas until there 
 comes the happy close, when Demeter laughs 
 once more : —
 
 70 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 " Uprose the blade in green, the leaf in red, 
 The tree of water and the tree of wood : 
 And soon among the branches overhead 
 Gave beauty juicy issue sweet for food. 
 O Laughter ! beauty plumped and love had birth. 
 Laughter ! O thou reviver of sick Earth ! 
 
 Good for the spirit, good 
 For body, thou ! to both art wine and bread ! " 
 
 Who that has once read it can forget the 
 picture of the water rat cleaning himself as 
 given in " An Old Chartist ? " or that of the 
 wild cherry in bloom to which I have already- 
 referred ? or that beautiful lyrical welcome 
 to the " Thrush in February ? " 
 
 Not, then, of the Nature-worshippers who 
 forget Humanity is Mr Meredith, and his 
 more pointed reference to the close inter- 
 threading of nature with mankind is to be 
 found in his sonnet entitled *' Earth's Secret," 
 a sonnet which may stand here as repre- 
 sentative of a strikine series : — 
 
 c> 
 
 " Not solitarily in fields we find 
 Earth's secret open, though one page is there ;
 
 THE POET 71 
 
 Her plainest, such as children spell, and share 
 
 With bird and beast ; raised letters for the blind. 
 
 Not where the troubled passions toss the mind, 
 
 In turbid cities, can the key be bare. 
 
 It hangs for those who hither thither fare, 
 
 Close interthreading nature with our kind. 
 
 They, hearing History speak, of what men were, 
 
 And have become, are wise. The gain is great 
 
 In vision and solidity ; it lives. 
 
 Yet at a thought of life apart from her, 
 
 Solidity and vision lose their state, 
 
 For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives." 
 
 This sonnet serves as a natural transition 
 from the treatment of Mr Meredith's nature 
 poetry to that in which he treats of men and 
 of human passions, and here, again, we find 
 a wide range of subject and treatment, from 
 those of the death of the fair-haunting 
 juggler to those of the idyllic " Love in the 
 Valley," or from those of " Three Singers to 
 Young Blood " to the " Ballad of Fair Ladies 
 in Revolt." The first of the poems I have 
 named is "Juggling Jerry," a brief master- 
 piece, a little epic of the roadside, giving 
 the brave, dying words of the old juggler.
 
 72 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Simple and direct in its pathos, it is almost 
 impossible to read it carefully with dry eyes. 
 And yet our tears are not tears of pain, but 
 rather of homage to the brave soul calm in 
 the face of the great Juggler Death, and to 
 the genius who has created him immortally 
 dying— 
 
 "Yes, my old girl ! and it's no use crying : 
 Juggler, constable, king, must bow. 
 One that outjuggles all's been spying 
 Long to have me, and he has me now." 
 
 It is a neat stroke that the old man, in 
 giving his version of the platitude that 
 "sceptre and crown must tumble down," 
 should mention the constable, the embodi- 
 ment of power as he has met him, before 
 naming the far off monarch. His tribute to 
 humanity, and more especially to women, is 
 admirably true : — 
 
 "I've studied men from my topsy-turvy 
 Close, and, I reckon, rather true. 
 Some are fine fellows : some, right scurvy : 
 Most, a dash between the two.
 
 THE PORT 73 
 
 But it's a woman, old girl, that makes me 
 
 Think more kindly of the race : 
 And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me 
 
 When the Great Juggler I must face." 
 
 The end of the poem, too, where the dying 
 juggler recalls a sight long since seen of a 
 couple of gulls flying over the waves, one of 
 which was suddenly shot, is particularly strik- 
 ing, with its intensely pathetic application. In 
 the poem which immediately succeeds it in 
 the collected edition we have another piece, 
 "The Old Chartist," in which the author has 
 obviously delighted in limning a strong old 
 man, a strenuous fighter against circum- 
 stance, one who might have echoed Mr 
 Henley's heroic words — 
 
 " Under the bludgeonings of chance 
 My head is bloody, but unbowed." 
 
 This old man, who has suffered transportation 
 for the outspokenness of his opinions, returns 
 to his native country to "see the grain," 
 being one of those admirable philosophers
 
 74 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 who recognise that, to use his own words, 
 " If you see well you're king of what you see." 
 The old Chartist muses upon his past, and 
 declares himself still unbeaten and ready to 
 rouse the people up again were it not for the 
 fact that " home's where different politics jar 
 most." His "fair daughter," married to a 
 young linen-draper, has no liking for the old 
 man's views, and bluntly intimates that he is 
 their disgrace, and the old Chartist, musing 
 over his position, watches a water-rat sitting 
 at the stream-side assiduously washing him- 
 self— 
 
 "As if he thought to pass from black to white. 
 Like parson into lawny bishop," 
 
 and in describing it gives us a verbal 
 witticism unlooked for in its context. The 
 old Chartist does not watch master rat for 
 nothing, for, as he says, — 
 
 " You teach me a fine lesson, my old boy ! 
 I've looked on my superiors far too long, 
 And small has been my profit as my joy. 
 
 You've done the right while I've denounced the wrong.
 
 THE POET 75 
 
 Prosper me later ! 
 Like you, I will despise the sniggering throng, 
 
 And please myself and my Creator. 
 I'll bring the linen-draper and his wife 
 
 Some day to see you ; taking off my hat. 
 Should they ask why, I'll answer : in my life 
 
 I never found so true a democrat. 
 
 Base occupation 
 Can't rob you of your own esteem, old rat ! 
 
 I'll preach you to the British nation." 
 
 Here we get a happy instance of the poet 
 using his observation of what are called 
 small matters to great ends. 
 
 The poems which I have cited are direct 
 and understandable enough, and are repre- 
 sentative of the greatest part of Mr Mere- 
 dith's poetical work, but it remains to say 
 something of the " difficult " parts of the same 
 work. Mr Meredith has been charged with 
 attempting to make English verse something 
 other than it is, with seeking out-of-the-way 
 rhymes at the cost of both music and clarity 
 of expression, and with other literary sins. 
 Such charges have been brought by those
 
 76 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 folk who are ever ready to criticise a writer 
 who shows marked individuaHty ; who blame 
 a poet for not being like his poetical forebears, 
 instead of criticising him purely for what he 
 is. What we find in much of the poetical 
 work produced during the latter half of his 
 career by Mr Meredith is an involvedness 
 of expression — often combined with a skip- 
 ping of intermediate phrases in an argument 
 — which makes it by no means easy to get at 
 his meaning ; it is as though the poet had 
 written the matter down as it came to his 
 mind without attempting to spell it out, so 
 to speak, that it should be more readily 
 understanded of his readers. 
 
 Other qualities are here, too, in lavish 
 variety. In "The Ballad of Fair Ladies in 
 Revolt " we have a rich irradiation of 
 humour; in some of the " Ballads of Tragic 
 Life " we have the simple intensity of 
 the old ballad literature combined with, 
 at times, an irritating vagueness of story all 
 their own. "The Nuptials of Attila" is a
 
 THE POET 77 
 
 magnificent reading of history, " The Three 
 Singers to Young Blood" — passion, prudence 
 and love — is a delightful brief trilogy con- 
 taining, for who so wills to see it, sage 
 advice, the fruit of close observation. " The 
 Orchard and the Heath " presents a couple 
 of contrasted landscapes in words ; in the 
 first the poet sees a group of merry children 
 in a ripening apple orchard, in the second a 
 number of children round a gipsy encamp- 
 ment fire and a provender pot. Wonderful 
 is the descriptive power evidenced in such 
 stanzas as this on the gipsy girls starting a 
 race : — 
 
 " Three girls, with shoulders like a boat at sea 
 Tipped sideways by the wave (their clothing slid 
 
 From either ridge unequally), 
 
 Lean, swift and voluble, bestrid 
 A starting point, unfrocked to the bent knee." 
 
 In "Love is Winged," "Ask is Love 
 Divine" and "Joy is Fleet" we have three 
 lyric gems which are likely to shine in the 
 anthologies of the future ; while another
 
 78 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 beautiful lyric is " Marian," a perfect por- 
 trait in three lyrical stanzas of eight lines. 
 In the sonnet form, too, Mr Meredith has 
 given us some work that is great indeed. 
 " Lucifer in Starlight " is an addition to 
 the small group of the world's greatest 
 sonnets. It might have been written by 
 Milton ; subject, treatment and swing of 
 the verse are alike Miltonic, while the last 
 two lines are magnificent in their grand 
 simplicity. 
 
 In the two volumes of poems, as I 
 have said, will be found the great body 
 of Mr Meredith's poetical work, but much, 
 which he has not seen fit to reproduce in 
 that collected form, may be seen in the 
 separate earlier volumes and also in the 
 pages of periodicals, and such are of great 
 interest to all decided admirers of his pro- 
 ductions ; but here I have wished to confine 
 my Introduction to those of his writings 
 which are readily obtainable, so that a 
 reader as yet unacquainted, or but partially
 
 THE POET 79 
 
 acquainted, with the works may turn to 
 them. It is to be hoped that the poet will 
 yet sanction a really complete collection of 
 his poems, Since the two volumes to which 
 I have referred, Mr Meredith has issued 
 two books, Odes in Contribution to the Song 
 of French History, and A Reading of Life^ 
 with Other Poems. 
 
 The first named of these need not long 
 detain us here. Frankly, it is difficult 
 reading — reading which, while flashing 
 splendid passages on us again and again, 
 compels us ever to be harking back, and 
 often, though we may have done so several 
 times, leaving us bewildered. The Odes 
 are four, and deal with the French Revolu- 
 tion, with Napoleon the Great, with France 
 and the end of 1870 and with Alsace 
 Lorraine. 
 
 The second volume, while it is not 
 unmarked by the obscurity of much of the 
 author's later style in poetry, has some fine 
 pieces on man and nature, notably in the
 
 8o GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 opening stanzas on " The Vital Choice" and 
 the two succeeding pieces on the Goddesses 
 whom it is given to man to choose 
 between, — 
 
 " Or shall we run with Artemis, 
 Or yield the breast to Aphrodite ? " 
 
 In " The Night Walk " the beautiful limner 
 of word landscape again gives evidence of 
 his memorable power for springing imagina- 
 tion with a touch. Here, too, is a Heinesque 
 little " Song in the Songless," with which I 
 may conclude this chapter : — 
 
 " They have no song, the sedges dry, 
 
 And still they sing. 
 It is within my breast they sing, 
 
 As I pass by. 
 Within my breast they touch a string. 
 
 They wake a sigh. 
 There is but sound of sedges dry \ 
 
 In me they sing."
 
 Ill 
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 
 
 " I began to read Mr Meredith at about the time I 
 was deciding the comparative qualities of Plato and 
 Aristotle. To me he was, and is, as much a classic as 
 they : I approach him with as little personal feeling ; 
 and if I have to say that all of him is not, in my appre- 
 hension, equally good, I can say it with as little dis- 
 respect." G. S. Street. 
 
 In speaking of Mr Meredith's "earlier" 
 
 novels, I wish to signify all the fiction 
 
 which he issued before The Egoist^ that 
 
 work which is considered by many critics 
 
 the finest in a series containing several 
 
 masterpieces. These earlier novels, as it 
 
 will be remembered by those who have read 
 
 the biographical chapter, began with The 
 
 Shaving of Shagpat, and comprise Farina, 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard Fever el, Evan 
 F 8i
 
 82 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Harrington, Sandra Belloni (originally 
 Emilia in England), Rhoda Flemings Vit- 
 toria, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, 
 Beauchamf s Career, and The House on the 
 Beach. Here, indeed, we have a collection 
 which of itself would have sufficed to 
 establish a great reputation, but almost as 
 many works remain for discussion in the 
 next chapter which deals with The Egoist 
 and its successors. 
 
 It is no necessary part of the work of 
 the critic or eulogist to summarise in bald 
 paragraphs the story of the book or books 
 with which he may be dealing any more 
 than such summary is necessary to the right 
 understanding of his criticism or eulogy. 
 I differentiate criticism and eulogy thus 
 pointedly, because it is in accordance with 
 the spirit of the time so to do. The critic 
 has for so many readers come to signify the 
 fault-finder, and though it may be possible 
 for a minim man to mark faults in a great 
 — with the aid of dimmed glasses it is easiest
 
 THE EARLIER NO VELS 83 
 
 to find the spots on the sun — his province 
 must for the most part be that of a praiser. 
 The critic himself feels something like the 
 old dramatic chorus — one just drawing your 
 attention to that which, and you choose to 
 stay, is about to be presented to you. Of 
 the first novel with which we come to deal 
 when we take Mr Meredith's work in 
 chronological order, it is difficult to speak 
 without adapting to the purposes of criticism 
 something of the opulence of language which 
 he has himself expended on the book in 
 question. 
 
 If Mr Meredith's earliest essays as poet 
 were calculated to appeal to but a small 
 circle of readers, the same was certainly 
 true of his first example in that art in which 
 he was to win such a notable position. His 
 first volume of poems had been published in 
 185 1, his first volume of prose made its 
 appearance four years later with the title of 
 The Shaving of Shagpat : an Arabian En- 
 tertainment. Re-reading this, I am amazed
 
 84 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 at the recollection that it was published 
 when the author was but six-and-twenty. 
 Its sureness of touch, the splendour of its 
 imagination, the truly Oriental opulence of 
 its style, all seem the work of a man of letters 
 of ripe experience. 
 
 Of the book itself what can we say? It 
 is one which might well take its place as a 
 supplement to the Thousand Nights a?td a 
 Night for its glorious abandonment of all 
 that is — and all that is possible — for the 
 sake of that wonderful place which exists 
 only in the minds of the most imaginative 
 of men, but which, once reduced within the 
 bounds of human language, appeals to that 
 love of the marvellous inherent in the mind 
 of man all the world over. The work is, 
 indeed, an absolute triumph in the realm of 
 pure imagination — full of the wildest ex- 
 travagances told with the serenity of con- 
 fident faith — told, too, in such a manner as 
 to entrance the reader and make him free of 
 the realm of strangest happenings. The
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 85 
 
 simplicity of the causative machinery — 
 the shaving of a single hair on the head 
 of the illustrious Shagpat — is superb when 
 we think of the train of wonders which it 
 evolves. The opening passage is rich in 
 promise, which every subsequent page helps 
 to fulfil :— 
 
 " It was ordained that Shibli Baoraraof, 
 nephew to the renowned Baba Mustapha, 
 chief barber to the Court of Persia, should 
 shave Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son 
 of Shullum ; and they had been clothiers 
 for generations, even to the time of Shagpat 
 the illustrious. 
 
 ** Now, the story of Shibli Bagarag, and 
 of the ball he followed, and of the subter- 
 ranean kingdom he came to, and of the 
 enchanted palace he entered, and of the 
 sleeping king he shaved, and of the two 
 princesses he released, and of the Afrite 
 held in subjection by the arts of one and 
 bottled by her, is it not known as 't were 
 written on the finger - nails of men and
 
 86 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 traced in their corner-robes ? As the poet 
 says : 
 
 " ' Ripe with oft-telling and old is the tale, 
 But 't is of the sort that can never grow stale.' " 
 
 Splendidly is the promise fulfilled. We 
 follow the adventurous Shibli Bagarag from 
 his first interview with an old woman with- 
 out the city of Shagpat, as a starving and 
 discredited barber, up to the stupendous 
 operation to which he was destined, with 
 somethinor of breathless interest. The 
 strange doings are told with a rapidity and 
 vividness that compel the attention, whether 
 we are following Shibli Bagarag on his 
 roundabout route to the Identical, or reading 
 such slightly connected interludes as that 
 fascinating gem of Oriental splendour — and 
 of seeming Oriental manufacture — " Bhana- 
 var the Beautiful." The story, as has been 
 said, does not call for summarising — indeed, 
 it is perhaps best described as being not so 
 much a story as a number of stories held
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 87 
 
 together by the interest of Shibli Bagarag 
 in destroying the Identical, that portentous 
 single hair on the head of the greatly hirsute 
 Shagpat — but a few words may be written 
 on the subject of the style, and those words 
 may most fittingly be prefaced by the brief 
 foreword which the author contributed to 
 the first edition. This, which was dated 
 *' December 8, 1855," ran as follows : — 
 
 "It has seemed to me that the only way 
 to tell an Arabian story was by imitating 
 the style and manners of the Oriental story- 
 tellers. But such an attempt, whether suc- 
 cessful or not, may read like a translation : 
 I therefore think it better to prelude this 
 Entertainment by an avowal that it springs 
 from no Eastern source, and is in every 
 respect an original work." 
 
 Wonderfully have the spirit and style 
 of the Orientalist been caught, so wonder- 
 fully that we cannot but regret that Mr 
 Meredith has not kept this prefatory note 
 in all subsequent editions of the work.
 
 88 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 I have heard readers more than once 
 
 declare that The Shaving of Shagpat must 
 
 be a translation, or at least an adaptation, 
 
 one such pointing triumphantly with a kind 
 
 of Fluellen-Hke logic to the fact that there 
 
 is a Baba Mustapha in the Shavuig and a 
 
 Baba Mustapha in the Arabian Nights 
 
 Entertainment ! I should like, also, to 
 
 have seen the second prefatory note, which 
 
 appeared in the next two editions, given 
 
 in later ones. This second note ran thus : — 
 
 " It has been suggested to me by one 
 
 who has no fear of Allegories on the banks 
 
 of the Nile, that the hairy Shagpat must 
 
 stand to mean umbrageous Humbuo- con- 
 
 quering the sons of men ; and that Noorna 
 
 bin Noorka represents the Seasons, which 
 
 help us, if there is health in us, to dispel 
 
 the affliction of his shadow ; while my 
 
 heroic Shibli Bagarag is actually to be taken 
 
 for Circumstance, which works under their 
 
 changeful guidance towards our ultimate 
 
 release from bondage, but with a dis-
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 89 
 
 appointing apparent waywardness. The 
 excuse for such behaviour as this youth 
 exhibits is so good that I would will- 
 ingly let him wear the grand mask hereby 
 offered to him. But, though his back- 
 slidings cry loudly for some sheltering plea, 
 or garb of dignity, and though a story- 
 teller should be flattered to have it supposed 
 that anything very distinct was intended 
 by him, the Allegory must be rejected 
 altogether. The subtle Arab who con- 
 ceived Shagpat meant either very much 
 more, or he meant less ; and my belief is 
 that, designing in his wisdom simply to 
 amuse, he attempted to give a larger 
 embrace to time than is possible to the 
 profound dispenser of Allegories which 
 are mortal ; which, to be of any value, 
 must be perfectly clear, and when perfectly 
 clear, are as little attractive as Mrs 
 Malaprop's reptile." 
 
 The seeker for the allegorical in a pure 
 entertainment is here sufficiently snubbed.
 
 90 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Farina : a Legend of Cologne^ which was 
 Mr Meredith's next essay in fiction, need 
 not detain us long. It is a romantic 
 extravagance allied in spirit with the Shav- 
 ing of Shagpat, although saturated with the 
 mediaeval romanticism of the West, where 
 the early tale reflected Oriental splendours. 
 In many editions the two stories have 
 been bound together, and they certainly 
 stand apart from their author's later work, 
 although in them we find a plentiful display 
 of his genius as master of words. Farina, 
 the name of the hero, will be familiar to 
 all readers as that which confronts them 
 on the bottles of the famous odorous waters 
 of Cologne. It is a mediaeval tale of love 
 and love's distress, telling how, despite the 
 poverty of his circumstances, the power of 
 his rivals and the jealousy of a formidable 
 club, Farina won the fair Margarita, the 
 White Rose of Germany. Incidentally 
 Farina was a witness of the Monk 
 Gregory's contest with the Evil One on the
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 91 
 
 Drachenstein, the result of which contest 
 was that the Devil took a short cut to the 
 Nether World through Cologne, and Cologne 
 stank so foully therefore that none could 
 enter it. Farina was, however, blessed in 
 having witnessed the great struggle, and 
 was able to purify the city with the precious 
 liquid thenceforward famous as eau de 
 Cologne. The " legend," as set forth in 
 this short romance — it is but about a third 
 the length of Shagpat — is a gorgeous 
 piece of literary tapestry, and if less re- 
 markable than the earlier work, is yet a 
 story of curious distinction, and of con- 
 siderable interest in any record of its 
 author's literary development. The dialogue 
 between the Monk and the Devil in the 
 encounter on the stormy Drachen might 
 have been the inspiring model which Dr 
 Richard Garnett had before him when he 
 wrote some of his tales in that fascinating 
 miscellany of wit and wisdom, The Twilight 
 of the Gods.
 
 92 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 George Meredith was a young man of 
 thirty when he inaugurated a new kind 
 of fiction by the writing of The Ordeal of 
 Richard FevereL The Shaving of Shagpat 
 stood, and stands, sui generis^ and Farina 
 was but a tentative essay. The new fiction 
 thus quietly put before the reading pubHc 
 at the end of the fifties was by no means 
 popular, is, indeed, still far from that 
 popularity which is commanded by certain 
 more or less illiterate idols of the circulat- 
 ing libraries. This fact need not disturb 
 us, for, after all, it is by no means an in- 
 variable rule that that which is recognised as 
 true literature is really popular. 
 
 Every inaugurator of a " school " or a 
 " period " is, of course, but a remarkable 
 link in a continuous chain, and thus it is 
 worth noting that in the year in which 
 Richard Feverel was published Thackeray 
 issued The Virgijtians, Dickens The Tale 
 of Two Cities, and George Eliot her 
 Adam Bede. With Dickens Meredith has
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 93 
 
 little relationship as novelist beyond his 
 occasional presentation of a caricature 
 among the minor persons of a story ; 
 he stands much closer to Thackeray, and 
 from the outset, in one respect, he towers 
 above that master of the art of fiction, 
 namely, in his consummate power as a 
 delineator of women. 
 
 It is curious that at a time when 
 Thackeray was concerning himself with the 
 American War of Independence, in writing 
 a sequel to his masterpiece, and Dickens 
 was partly forgetting his power as carica- 
 turist in a tragedy ringed round by the 
 greater tragedy of the French Revolution, 
 the younger writer was devoting himself 
 to a close analytical study of contemporary 
 humanity. As master of the literary art, 
 as reader of character, he leaped at once 
 into the front rank, beginning his career 
 as novelist with a work which was to 
 be esteemed as one of the greatest novels 
 of the century. The fact was, however, at
 
 94 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 the time recognised by but few. It would 
 be in the highest sense interesting to know 
 if Thackeray read Richard Feverel and to 
 learn his judgment of the story. That some 
 folk realised the existence of a genius now 
 more fully made manifest was proved by 
 the fact that his immediately succeeding 
 novel was published serially. 
 
 Perhaps the best test of the true excel- 
 lence of a literary work is not to be found 
 in an account of its reception on publication, 
 not what will be thought of it — to take a 
 short view — a quarter of a century hence, 
 but rather to find out whether it goes on 
 becoming known to an ever-widening circle. 
 Will there, for every ten readers made 
 aware of its existence, be fifty or five hun- 
 dred readers after a term of years ? Will it, 
 in other words, remain in that magic sieve 
 through which Time is for ever dropping a 
 rapid stream of matter too light or too heavy 
 to be counted by him as worthy of such tem- 
 porary preservation as he allows to the best }
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 95 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard FeverelhdiS splendidly- 
 stood this test. It is now over forty years 
 since the novel was first published, and the 
 friends of Lucy and Richard and the cursers 
 of Sir Austin's infernal System have gone on 
 ever increasing in numbers. 
 
 Beautiful as is the romance of Richard and 
 Lucy, tragic as is its close, and strongly as 
 this may hold the reader who values a book 
 mainly for the way in which it can stimu- 
 late his liking for the tale of love and love's 
 distress, the work is largely a study of one 
 personality, the personality being that of 
 Sir Austin Feverel, the complete egoist 
 who strives too much to play the part of 
 Providence to his son. Having conceived 
 of a System for the upbringing of the youth, 
 everything is made to subordinate itself to 
 that System and the end for which it has 
 been designed. The blind thoroughness 
 with which it is carried out may best be 
 gathered from a quoted page, the opening 
 of the thirteenth chapter : —
 
 96 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 "It was now, as Sir Austin had written 
 it down, The Magnetic Age : the Age of 
 violent attractions, when to hear mention of 
 love is dangerous, and to see it, a communi- 
 cation of the disease. People at Raynham 
 were put on their guard by the baronet, 
 and his reputation for wisdom was severely 
 criticised in consequence of the injunctions 
 he thought fit to issue through butler and 
 
 o o 
 
 housekeeper down to the lower household, 
 for the preservation of his son from any 
 visible symptom of the passion. A footman 
 and two housemaids are believed to have 
 been dismissed on the report of heavy 
 Benson that they were in or inclining to the 
 state ; upon which an undercook and a 
 dairymaid voluntarily threw up their places, 
 averring that ' they did not want no young 
 men, but to have their sex spied after by an 
 old wretch like that,' indicating the ponderous 
 butler, ' was a little too much for a Christian 
 woman,' and then they were ungenerous 
 enough to glance at Benson's well-known
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS^ 97 
 
 marital calamity, hinting' that some men met 
 their deserts. So intolerable did heavy- 
 Benson's espionage become, that Raynham 
 would have grown depopulated of its woman- 
 kind had not Adrian interfered, who pointed 
 out to the baronet what a fearful arm his 
 butler was wielding. Sir Austin acknow- 
 ledged it despondently. ' It only shows,' 
 said he, with a fine spirit of justice, 'how 
 all but impossible it is to legislate where 
 there are women ! ' 
 
 "'I do not object,' he added; 'I hope I 
 am too just to object to the exercise of their 
 natural inclinations. All I ask from them 
 is discreetness.' 
 
 "'Ay,' said Adrian, whose discreetness 
 was a marvel. 
 
 * " No gadding about in couples,' continued 
 the baronet, ' no kissing in public. Such 
 occurrences no boy should witness. When- 
 ever people of both sexes are thrown to- 
 gether they will be silly ; and where they are 
 
 high-fed, uneducated, and barely occupied, 
 
 G
 
 98 GEORGE ^lEREDITH 
 
 it must be looked for as a matter of course. 
 Let it be known that I only require discreet- 
 ness.' 
 
 " Discreetness, therefore, was instructed 
 to reign at the Abbey. Under Adrian's 
 able tuition the fairest of its domestics ac- 
 quired that virtue. 
 
 " Discreetness, too, was enjoined to the 
 upper household." 
 
 This is not the place to follow out the 
 story of the System — how it blasted Richard's 
 young life, destroyed his girl wife and left 
 its originator with something yet of the 
 smug superiority out of which it grew. 
 Towards the close of the book we read : " ' I 
 may have been wrong in one thing,' he said, 
 with an air of the utmost doubt of it. ' I, 
 perhaps, was wrong in allowing him so much 
 liberty during his probation.' " Had there 
 been a few more men of the type of Austin 
 Wentworth about him, and fewer of the 
 Algernon, Adrian and Hippias types, it would 
 have been well for the lives of all concerned,
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 99 
 
 but fatal to the story which stands as one of 
 the greatest romances of the age and, ac- 
 cording to some critics, the best of its author's 
 novels, though the first. In this story we 
 have at the very outset of Mr Meredith's 
 career as novelist some of his most notable 
 characteristics plainly before us. The care- 
 ful, close and relentless presentation of the 
 central character, the no less distinct in- 
 dividualising of others, whether prominent 
 or subsidiary — even where a tinker and a 
 ploughman appear for a brief while they are 
 made real to us with their "pithy, vulgar 
 talk, succulent with honest nature and book- 
 less mother wit," to use James Thomson's 
 phrase. Then, too, there is an absence 
 of all material sensationalism, all external 
 violence, events being produced by the 
 consistent action, interaction and counter- 
 action of individuals — the sum of which in 
 real life is perhaps what we mean when we 
 talk of Circumstance. Through the whole 
 there runs that kindly irradiation which is
 
 loo GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 often the best manifestation of humour, and 
 never far to seek are those crystalHsations 
 of happy thoughts in a few words which 
 constitute wit. We have a deHghtful in- 
 stance of the latter in Lady Blandish's neat 
 turning of the tables on the aphoristic 
 baronet whose System has reached one of its 
 darker moments. " When a wise man makes 
 a false step will he not go farther than a 
 fool ? " Lady Blandish's modest question 
 might stand as the text of the whole novel 
 — if only we could bring ourselves to 
 acknowledge the wisdom of Sir Austin 
 Feverel. 
 
 In this his first novel Mr Meredith at 
 once gave proof of his insight and ability in 
 the portrayal of women — far removed from 
 the "wooden" or "galvanised," which are, 
 he tells us, sweet alike to writer as to reader. 
 Lucy, the simple, loving girl, true as steel 
 to her love ; Mrs Berry, a human character 
 of the class of which Mrs Gamp is the im- 
 mortal caricature ; Lady Blandish with her
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS loi 
 
 womanly humanity and commonsense ever 
 clashinof with her affection for Sir Austin ; 
 worldly Mrs Doria and her weak daughter 
 — all of these live. Even where there is a 
 slight tendency to caricature, as in the 
 colossal " Dyspepsy," Hippias Feverel, the 
 author has always held command of his 
 creation and kept him within the bounds of 
 the actual, for Hippias is as real as Joseph 
 Sedley. Essential poetry is here in thought 
 and in description — and especially in that 
 triumphant chapter (who that has once read 
 it understandingly can ever forget it ?) which 
 tells of the first meeting of Richard and 
 Lucy during the Magnetic Age, when cer- 
 tain singers to young blood set all the 
 barriers of the System at nought. 
 
 In his succeedino- novel Mr Meredith orave 
 us that wonderful adaptation of Sartor 
 Resartus to the purpose of romance, that 
 prose "sartoriad," to use his own word, 
 Evan Harrington. Here again the story — 
 the love passages between a young couple —
 
 I02 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 interesting as it will be found even by the 
 avid story-reader, was made subservient to 
 the remorseless delineation of a single 
 character, and in this case the character 
 was that of a woman. On closing this 
 comedy — the work of a novelist Moliere — 
 the type-figure remaining in our memory is 
 that of the tailor's daughter married to the 
 insiofnificant Portuofuese count — the Countess 
 de Saldar. The keynote to her character 
 may be found in a few lines from a letter to 
 her sister written from a country mansion 
 where she was staying : "In future, my dear, 
 let it be De Saldar de Sancorvo. That is our 
 title by rights, and it may as well be so in 
 England. English Cou7itess is certainly best. 
 Always put the de'' 
 
 This is a story of the conflict between 
 "trade" and "blood" — and in these days 
 trade is so far triumphant that we have to 
 remember that nearly forty years have passed 
 since Eva^t Harrington was written. Daring 
 was the resolve to make a hero — and a
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 103 
 
 gentleman — not only of a tradesman, but 
 even of one who practised that trade at 
 which Scorn, for some inscrutable reason, 
 ever directs her proverb -pointed digit. 
 Clearly and convincingly — thanks to the 
 scheming Countess — Is the difficult romance 
 brought about so as to instal the penniless 
 son of a tailor — himself doomed to tailordom 
 — as a guest in a country mansion within 
 riding reach of the place of his origin, and 
 consistently are matters developed to the 
 close. 
 
 "The poetry of my Countess's achieve- 
 ments waxes rich in manifold colours : I see 
 her by the light of her own pleas to Pro- 
 vidence. I doubt almost if the hand be 
 mine which dared to make a hero play 
 second fiddle, and to his beloved. I have 
 placed a bushel over his light, certainly. 
 Poor boy ! it was enough that he should 
 have tailordom on his shoulders : I ought to 
 have allowed him to conquer Nature, and so 
 come out of his eclipse. This shall be said
 
 I04 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 of him : that he can play second fiddle with- 
 out looking foolish, which, for my part, I call 
 a greater triumph than if he were perform- 
 inof the heroics we are more accustomed to." 
 Technically, as it seems to me, Evan 
 Harrington is in certain respects an advance 
 upon The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ; there 
 is a more complicated story, more of the 
 interplay of diverse characters, and as a 
 consequence more remarkable creations. In 
 this re^iprd Mr Meredith is here absolutely 
 lavish, prodigal as Dickens in his longer 
 stories, and no less successfully does he dif- 
 ferentiate, while more successfully does he 
 develop them. I have cited the Countess 
 de Saldar, who is indeed a marvellous repre- 
 sentation — a more subtly vulgar, a more 
 accomplished and a more fascinating Becky 
 Sharp — though I can scarcely go to the 
 length of Mr Richard Le Gallienne, who, 
 for the purpose of paying a compliment 
 to Mr Meredith, condemns a sex, and 
 speaks of her as that "wonderful study of
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 105 
 
 woman in her crreat natural role of char- 
 latan." Mrs Mel, the self-sufficient, inflexible 
 widow of the splendid tailor ; Caroline Strike, 
 the weakest and most lovable of the 
 daughters of the shears ; the loving, girlish 
 Rose, and, above all, Lady Jocelyn, are as 
 convincingly natural representatives of their 
 sex as the scheming snob - woman, the 
 Countess. They are less elaborately drawn, 
 it is true, for the character of the incom- 
 parable De Saldar is delineated with an 
 elaboration of detail which Mr Meredith 
 might have learned from his friends of the 
 Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood. Of the truly 
 Shakespearean quality of individualising 
 minor characters we have here illustrations, 
 but hinted at in the earlier novel and in 
 chapters VIII. XI. and XII. are some of 
 the finest inn-scenes of which I know in our 
 literature. 
 
 Society having been limned in the first 
 novel and Trade in the second, the novelist 
 turned to a fresh field for his social studies
 
 io6 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 and wrote Emilia in England, where the 
 romance circles round the nouveau ricke, 
 with a young ItaHan as the fascinating 
 heroine, and a heroine such as Mr Meredith 
 can deHneate with loving insight and sym- 
 pathy. He does not pander to the taste for 
 "diseased little heroines," whom he referred 
 to incidentally in Evan Harringtojt. Sandra 
 — for, despite her other names Emilia and 
 Vittoria, it is as Sandra that we remember 
 her — is a delight from when we first hear 
 that wonderful voice of hers at night in the 
 woodland part of a Surrey common, in the 
 second chapter of this book, until we bid her 
 farewell on the last page of Vittoria. Quite 
 apart from the heroine, with her great voice 
 and her passionate love for oppressed Italy, 
 the novel is remarkable for the gallery of 
 successful character portraits presented in its 
 pages — though this is, of course, one of the 
 most notable features of Mr Meredith's 
 work as novelist. The Pole family is un- 
 forgetable, with the unobtrusive money-
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 107 
 
 making father, and his three daughters in 
 league together to jockey him into a position 
 of social importance, who study the shades 
 of fine feeling that they may not err in being 
 too familiar or too distant with the acquaint- 
 ances on the social plane which they are 
 desirous of leavinof for a higher. We have 
 here evidence of the studies in social comedy 
 which in later years were to produce 7'ke 
 Egoist. Arabella, Cornelia and Adela Pole 
 are neatly differentiated by fine shades 
 (Pole, Polar and North Pole were the terms 
 by which among themselves they defined the 
 nice shades of difference in their bows — 
 which the Tinleys, their rivals on the lower 
 plane, cruelly perverted into Pole, Polony 
 and Maypole). These three sisters have one 
 brother, Wilfrid, whom they look to as an aid 
 in their campaign of social advancement, 
 while he himself is torn by the old conflict 
 of love and interest. Mrs Chump, too, the 
 Irish widow who is courted by old Pole, but 
 whose presence is a perpetual irritant to his
 
 io8 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 sensitive daughters, is a notable addition to 
 Mr Meredith's gallery of eccentrics, though 
 it has been declared by Irish critics other- 
 wise sympathetic that her brogue is not Irish. 
 Another prominent eccentric is Mr Pericles, 
 the moneyed Greek merchant who, ridiculous 
 as he is in many respects, and much as he 
 gains our contempt, yet claims our sympathy 
 by his whole-hearted devotion to Sandra 
 Belloni's wonderful voice. 
 
 Pericles has a big part to play, too, in 
 the inevitable humbling of the nouveau riche, 
 and also in the arranoring- of Sandra Belloni's 
 future. It is Wilfrid Pole who awakens 
 the passion of love in Sandra's breast, but 
 who has not the courage to cleave to her 
 when circumstance, powerfully aided by 
 his ambitious family, drives him towards 
 a lady with a title ; he is indeed a weak 
 hero, and one whom we realise as fore- 
 doomed to failure. He is not worthy of 
 Sandra in any way, although he is one of 
 the principals in a love-scene at Wilming
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 109 
 
 Weir which is only comparable to the 
 idyllic meeting of Lucy and Richard in 
 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Letting 
 " I dare not " wait upon " I would," he 
 makes shipwreck of his hopes and gives a 
 rude shock to the girl who has unreservedly 
 declared her passion for him. Sandra her- 
 self is indeed a triumph : in her we feel that 
 Mr Meredith first drew one of his great 
 type - women ; she is passion and song 
 incarnate in the form of a beautiful woman — 
 we feel impelled to love her in the first 
 novel which is devoted to her story, but 
 we are compelled to do so when we meet 
 her again as Vittoria in the sequel of that 
 name. Here the scene is changed to Italy, 
 and the story opens with a small gathering 
 on the Monte Motterone, when Sandra 
 meets several of the leaders in the coming 
 contest against the triumphing Austrians. 
 Here the nameless "Chief" makes brief 
 but impressive appearance. The time is 
 that of the Lombard revolt of 1848 and
 
 no GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 the Chief is, of course, Mazzini. Through- 
 out the book Sandra, under her singer's 
 name of Vittoria, is of course the central 
 fiofure in the Italian risino^s. Her whilom 
 lover, the young English officer Wilfrid 
 Pole, has joined the Austrian service (in 
 which he has an uncle who is a general), 
 and the girlish love which she had felt for 
 him becomes the woman's passion for a 
 young Italian leader, Carlo Ammiani. 
 The nisrht of Sandra's dibut at La Scala 
 in Milan is chosen for the moment of the 
 Italian rising, and she is chosen to give 
 the signal from the stage. Communicating 
 with her old lover, she arouses suspicion 
 in an arch-schemer, through whose influence 
 the moment of the rising is postponed for 
 a week. Bound by her promise to the 
 Chief, and despite the urgent wishes of her 
 lover, the advice of her friends and the 
 suspicions of the Austrians, she determines 
 to fulfil her task. She does so, and only 
 escapes from the theatre by the connivance
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 1 1 1 
 
 of some Austrian officers. Henceforward, 
 first as fugitive and then following the army, 
 we find her severely tried but greatly equal 
 to her trials ; often misunderstood, even 
 by those loving her the most, she always 
 justifies her own nature as one of the 
 novelist's greatest women — a woman in 
 whose presentation we feel that he has 
 laboured as lovingly as in those other great 
 women whom he has given us as central 
 figures in The Egoist, in Diana of the 
 Crossways and in The Tragic Comedians. 
 Mr Meredith makes most of the men, of 
 impressionable age, who meet her fall in 
 love with this splendid type of womanhood, 
 and so subtly does he present her to his 
 readers that I fancy that there are few who 
 do not feel for her something of the devotion 
 of Merthyr Powys — the Welsh gentleman 
 who devotes himself and his fortune, ably 
 seconded by his noble sister, to the cause 
 of Italian freedom. If in the years that 
 followed her brief married life Sandra
 
 112 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 married again, we may feel content that 
 it was to Merthyr Powys that she was united 
 — the only one of her lovers of whom it 
 can be said that he was entirely worthy. 
 Powys plays a strong but unobtrusive part 
 in the development of Sandra's destiny in 
 both of the novels, and on him Mr Meredith 
 has lavished his admiration for the Welsh 
 character. It is rarely that a sequel is 
 as good as the work which it succeeds, 
 but Vittoria is a triumphant exception to 
 the rule. It is a fine story looked at from 
 the mere story-book point of view, but 
 when we examine its characterisation, its 
 reflection of the popular movement in Italy, 
 its presentment of scenes and situations, 
 its breadth of treatment, it is an amazing 
 masterpiece. 
 
 Sandra Belloni was produced, as I 
 pointed out in an earlier chapter, in 1864, 
 and Vittoria (after running serially through 
 one of the reviews) in 1867, but between 
 the writing of these two parts of one great
 
 THE EARLIER NO VELS 1 1 3 
 
 whole Mr Meredith found time to write 
 another novel of a different character — 
 the simple but tragic story of Rhoda 
 Fleming. With much in it that is charac- 
 teristic of its author's better work, this 
 book is found a little disappointing in 
 some respects by his best admirers. In 
 it we have the simplicity of the country 
 contrasted with the villainy of the town, 
 although the author is much too clear- 
 sighted an observer to attempt to give a 
 monopoly of either quality to either place. 
 In baldest outline the story is one of the 
 seduction of a farmer's daughter under 
 cover of a pretended marriage. The whole 
 romance centres in that, for although the 
 eponymous heroine is the one for whom 
 we feel the greatest interest, it is her 
 sister Dahlia who is the principal figure 
 of the painful drama. It is a good 
 example of Mr Meredith's method, as 
 described by himself, of introducing various 
 
 characters and working them up to a 
 
 W
 
 114 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 critical position and then showing how their 
 various natures behave in that crisis. The 
 whole is vaguely foreshadowed in the last 
 paragraph of the first chapter. It is May- 
 Day being celebrated in the neighbourhood 
 of the Kentish farm from which the two 
 heroines spring : — 
 
 "The magic of the weather brought 
 numerous butterflies afield, and one fiddler, 
 to whose tuning the little women danced ; 
 others closer upon womanhood would have 
 danced likewise, if the sisters had taken 
 partners ; but Dahlia was restrained by the 
 sudden consciousness that she was under 
 the immediate observation of two manifestly 
 London gentlemen, and she declined to 
 be led forth by Robert Armstrong. The 
 intruders were youths of good countenance, 
 known to be the son and nephew of Squire 
 Blancove of Wrexby Hall. They remained 
 for some time watching the scene, and 
 destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like 
 many days of gaiety, the Gods consenting,
 
 THE EARLIER NO VELS 1 1 5 
 
 this one had its human shadow. There 
 appeared on the borders of the festivity 
 a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby 
 cottager, who had left her home and but 
 lately returned to it, with a spotted name. 
 No one addressed her, and she stood 
 humbly apart. Dahlia, seeing that every- 
 one moved away from her, whispering with 
 satisfied noddings, wished to draw her m 
 among the groups. She mentioned the 
 name of Mary Burt to her father, supposing 
 that so kind a man would not fail to sanction 
 her going up to the neglected young woman. 
 To her surprise, her father became violently 
 enraged, and uttered a stern prohibition, 
 speaking a word that stained her cheeks. 
 Rhoda was by her side, and she wilfully, 
 without asking leave, went straight over to 
 Mary, and stood with her under the shadow 
 of the Adam and Eve, until the farmer 
 sent a messenger to say that he was about 
 to enter the house. Her punishment for 
 the act of sinfulness was a week of severe
 
 Ii6 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 silence ; and the farmer would have kept 
 her to it longer, but for her mother's 
 ominously growing weakness. The sisters 
 were strangely overclouded by this incident. 
 They could not fathom the meaning of 
 their father's unkindness, coarseness and 
 indignation. Why, and why ? they asked 
 one another blankly. The Scriptures were 
 harsh in one part, but was the teaching to 
 continue so after the Atonement } By 
 degrees they came to reflect, and not in a 
 mild spirit, that the kindest of men can 
 be cruel, and will forget their Christianity 
 toward offending and repentant women." 
 
 Here at the very outset we have a subtle 
 indication of the whole tragedy, for the 
 reader is made to feel instinctively that the 
 cloud over the scene is charged with the 
 lightning of a coming storm. The story 
 is fuller of what I may call conventionally 
 dramatic situations than any other of this 
 o-reat series of novels. The tragedy 
 develops quiedy enough at first with
 
 THE EA RLIER NO VELS 1 1 7 
 
 Dahlia's departure for the MetropoHs as 
 companion to an old uncle who is messenger 
 at a City bank, but who is credited by the 
 bucolic mind with the possession of as much 
 wealth as he handles. From Dahlia's 
 elopement the development of the story 
 moves rapidly, every stage of its progress 
 illustrating the individuality of each of the 
 many actors concerned. Full of thoroughly 
 characteristic matter, Rhoda Fleming is yet 
 in some ways disappointing. It is dis- 
 appointing perhaps only in a conventional 
 sense that in neither of the sisters do we 
 feel that we have a heroine with whom we 
 can unreservedly sympathise. Dahlia, the 
 weak, confidinor nature with somethinor of 
 rustic obstinacy at the back of all, has our 
 pity, and Rhoda wins our esteem by the 
 strong consistency of her actions. We fully 
 realise the way in which she would have 
 inspired love in Robert, but we feel that with 
 a touch more of tenderness tempering her 
 desire for justice we should have had a more
 
 n8 GEORCE MEREDITH 
 
 lovable heroine. Yet let it be conceded at 
 once that there are such women as Rhoda ; 
 most of us know them — women of absolute 
 rectitude themselves who in their insistence 
 upon their view of the right course give 
 considerable discomfort (to put it at its 
 mildest) to other people. With such a 
 woman the development of the story might 
 probably have been as Mr Meredith has 
 told it, but we must also remember Dahlia, 
 and she, it may be imagined, would have 
 attempted to poison herself rather earlier 
 than she did. A realist less ruthless than 
 Mr Meredith would have been sorely 
 tempted to stop the marriage with Nick 
 Sedgett and have allowed the repentant 
 Edward Blancove to undo the mischief 
 he had done so far as he was able, but 
 the greater novelists follow life rather than 
 sensational conventions, and life does not 
 always run to a happy close. Edward 
 Blancove, too, is so cool in his villainy 
 that we do not altogether believe in his
 
 i ■^: 
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 119 
 
 tardy repentance. Farmer Fleming with ^ i^ 
 his rigid ideas, Robert Armstrong, Algernon ^Aj^^ 
 Blancove, the "fool" of the tragedy, Mrs 
 Lovell and Anthony Hackbut — these are the 
 character triumphs of the story ; and the old 
 countryman, Mas' Gammon — an animated 
 piece of Kentish clay — with his infinite 
 capacity for taking dumpling — though I have 
 heard true Meredithians condemn him as 
 unreal, seems to me a fine presentation of the 
 narrow, stolid, vegetant farm hand that is, 
 we may believe, being educated off the 
 land. 
 
 It is not surprising with a writer such 
 as Mr Meredith that generally a couple of 
 years or more — generally more — passed 
 between the production of any two of his 
 novels. Vittoria was published in 1867 
 after its serial appearance, and it was 1871 
 before the next story appeared in book form, 
 having run through the pages of the Corn- 
 hill Alagazine. 
 
 With this new novel, The Adventures of
 
 I20 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Harry Richmond, we come to a story which 
 contained similarities to, and some essential 
 differences from, those which preceded it. 
 Where it differs from all the other of Mr 
 Meredith's stories is in the fact of its being 
 told in autobiographic form, a fashion which 
 best suits the extravagance of its idea. This 
 idea is somewhat like that at the back of the 
 splendid tailor, but with considerable changes 
 in the matter of rank. Evan, thanks to a 
 wonderful father and a socially ambitious 
 sister, finds himself — the son of a tailor — 
 congregating with the county notables ; 
 Harry Richmond is the grandson and 
 apparent heir of one of the richest of such 
 notables, but he has a father who seeks to 
 establish nothing less than their position as 
 connections of the Throne. (Surely the 
 great Roy might better claim direct kin- 
 ship with the great Mel than a bend-sinister 
 connection with the Guelphs !) Here such 
 a fine master of comedy as Mr Meredith 
 gave himself an excellent opportunity, and
 
 THE EA RLIER NO VELS 1 2 1 
 
 by telling the story through the mouth of 
 the young man he avoided the falling into 
 farce or melodrama. As it is, the element 
 of farce is by no means absent. Augustus 
 Fitz-Gcorge Roy Richmond is a marvellous 
 being ; half genuine, half mountebank and 
 wholly fascinating, he succeeds in impress- 
 ing the reader with something of the con- 
 viction which he imparted to most of those 
 who came within the charmed circle of 
 his immediate influence. He is a mixture 
 of the beau and the mountebank — as the 
 former we see him triumphing at Bath and 
 seekinor to restore the fashionable grlories 
 of that resort, and as the latter he is seen 
 to perfection in that unforgetable chapter 
 where he poses as the equestrian statue of 
 the hero of a petty German principality. 
 He is really great in his blazing brilliancy 
 with his "Case," by which he is confident 
 of wrestino- recog-nition and a fittinor income 
 from the Enorlish Government. He is a 
 very prince in his magnificence when he
 
 122 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 has the funds, or can command becoming 
 credit, but he suffers the ups and downs of 
 the splendid adventurer and very seriously 
 threatens the continued prosperity of the 
 son for whose advancement he labours so 
 unceasingly and so unwisely. Contrasting 
 with Roy Richmond is Squire Beltham, 
 Harry's maternal grandfather — a hearty, 
 bluff old man with the most uncompromis- 
 ing hatred of the man who had eloped 
 with his daughter. Beltham, it is easy to 
 believe, is a character in the creation of 
 whom the novelist delighted ; he is hearty, 
 downright, wholesome, English, and a 
 hater after Dr Johnson's heart, while his 
 daughter, the loving and love-inspiring Aunt 
 Dorothy, is one of the most perfect portraits 
 in miniature which Mr Meredith has given 
 us. Her part in the story is that of the 
 good fairy, and her reward the having to 
 listen to the Squire's outbursts when he 
 lashes the discredited Roy with the un- 
 restrained passion of his invective and
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS ns 
 
 Strips him bare for scorn to point at. The 
 hero is very awkwardly placed betwixt such 
 a grandfather-guardian and such a parent. 
 Thanks to these opposing influences, he 
 has a most adventurous career ; the author's 
 object in writing this novel might indeed 
 have been to show that even in the days 
 of the nineteenth century adventures were 
 still to the adventurous, for Harry certainly, 
 thanks now to his love for his fascinating 
 father, and now to a spirit of something 
 like quixotry, becomes the central figure 
 of adventures of a startling character at 
 home and abroad, by land and by sea. 
 Less engrossing perhaps for any central 
 character study this is perhaps the most 
 engrossing of all its author's works con- 
 sidered merely as story. The reader is 
 kept in doubt to the very close as to what 
 is to be the end of Harry Richmond's 
 romance : some folk — lovers of the romantic 
 spirit, those who cry with the pathetic 
 poet,
 
 124 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 "Ye gods, annihilate time and space, 
 And make two lovers happy," 
 
 — will hope that the hero is to wed his 
 German princess, others will be firm ad- 
 herents of the sterling English girl, Janet 
 Ilchester. Without any undue straining 
 the result remains in doubt until we reach 
 the end, and of course, from the story-lover's 
 point of view, the work gains thereby. For 
 pure story, indeed, I think that no novel of 
 Mr Meredith's is better than this ; though 
 perhaps Rhoda Fleming comes very near 
 to it in this respect. The boisterous liveli- 
 ness of the later novel will, however, prove 
 a further recommendation to many readers 
 — it is as full of richest fun, of glorious 
 abandon, of pulsing, hot-blooded life as 
 Elizabethan comedy. 
 
 Mr Meredith's next novel, the last before 
 the appearance of The Egoist^ is Beati- 
 chamfs Career, a story which one of the 
 author's admirers stigmatises as unutterably
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 125 
 
 dull, and which another ranks high for con- 
 taining in its pages one of the novelist's 
 great type- women. It is notable, as Mr R. 
 Maynard Leonard has pointed out in a brief 
 but interesting paper on " Politics in George 
 Meredith's Novel,"* for being the one really 
 political novel which the author has given 
 us, although incidental passages on politics 
 are found in many of them. Here the very 
 substance of the work is political, the chief 
 characters belong to the two great parties 
 which have so long shared power in this 
 land, and out of them and the interaction of 
 their political beliefs the drama is evolved. 
 As hero Mr Meredith is fond of taking a 
 youth whose training has been influenced by 
 his being early orphaned or by his having 
 been brought up by one parent only : 
 Richard Feverel had no living mother to 
 modify his father's eccentricities ; Evan Har- 
 rington has lost his father at the moment that 
 we take up his story ; Sandra has fled from 
 
 * New Liberal Review^ November 1901.
 
 126 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 parental influence ; Rhoda Fleming and her 
 sister are motherless when most needing a 
 mother's guidance ; Harry Richmond was in 
 this regard on the same footing as Richard 
 Feverel. Here in Nevil Beauchamp we 
 have a hero orphaned as a boy and brought 
 up by an uncle who is a fine specimen of 
 the old nobility — " with his strength and 
 skill, his robust commonsense and rough, 
 shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons, his 
 chivalry, his love of combat, his old knightly 
 blood." This uncle, Everard Romfrey, 
 afterwards Earl Romfrey, fascinates even 
 when most in opposition to the hero, and 
 the opposition waxes severe at times when 
 the Tory nobleman finds his nephew joined 
 not with the Liberals but with the Radicals, 
 and the Radicals, be it remembered, of a 
 generation ago. Although the story has 
 much in it of varied love interest it is largely 
 a record of the clashing of diverse wits, 
 engaged now in pursuit of beauty and now 
 in pursuit of national well-being. Nevil
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 127 
 
 begins, fittingly enough, as a middy in the 
 Navy in the days of the Crimean War, he 
 becomes one of the recognised heroes of 
 the time and wins rapid promotion, but as 
 captain ruins his prospects of further ad- 
 vancement by throwing himself whole- 
 heartedly into the Radical cause. Landing 
 from his ship he has fallen in with a notable 
 Radical leader in the person of Dr Shrapnel 
 and at once, with characteristic impetuosity, 
 flings himself into an election contest, with- 
 out even communicating with his uncle, who, 
 however, is the means not perhaps of getting 
 him defeated, but of getting him defeated 
 by his worthless, scheming cousin. It is 
 hoped to give Nevil a lesson, but his lack 
 of success by no means throws him back to 
 the family Toryism ; he is devoted to his 
 new cause, and from being a Radical de- 
 clares himself a Republican. His love 
 stories are closely blent with his work as 
 naval officer and later as political agitator ; 
 first he has a boyish and abiding passion
 
 128 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 for a beautiful young French woman, a 
 maturer affection for Cecilia Halkett, and 
 a love begotten of propinquity for Jenny 
 Denham. Propinquity wins, but somehow 
 the love story of Beauchamp is by no means 
 the most interesting part of his career ; he 
 is largely attractive for his likeness to his 
 uncle — the same personal qualities underlie 
 their wide differences, and we feel that in 
 a sense the whole of Beauchamp's "career" 
 is a duel with the head of the house from 
 which he has sprung, and what is more, we 
 feel that Nevil, in his tragic self-sacrifice at 
 the close, has conquered. It is a fine touch 
 where, while looking for Nevil's body, the 
 stricken old Earl thinks at once of the 
 infant son whom Nevil has left, now his own 
 heir ; he is speaking to the afflicted Shrapnel, 
 " My wife has gone down to Mrs Beau- 
 champ," he said. " She will bring her and 
 the baby to Mount Laurels. The child will 
 have to be hand-fed. I take you with me. 
 You must not be alone." One needs to
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 129 
 
 have read the story to appreciate this fine 
 touch of character, to remember that he is 
 speaking to the man who had won in the 
 contest. Shrapnel is indeed a wonderful 
 character, one who abides with us long 
 after we have laid aside the book which 
 gives him life. A trenchant and uncompro- 
 mising Radical, he is an original thinker, 
 and one finely fitted for inspiring confidence 
 in generous minds coming under his per- 
 sonal influence, and, above all, in one such 
 as Nevil Beauchamp, who from boyhood 
 had been a reader of Carlyle : — 
 
 " His favourite author was one writing 
 of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style 
 resembling either early architecture or utter 
 dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed ; 
 a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled 
 down here and there an appreciable fruit 
 with uncouth ' bluster ; sentences without 
 commencements running to abrupt endings 
 and smoke, like waves against a sea wall, 
 
 learned dictionary words giving a hand to 
 
 I
 
 I30 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Street slang, and accents falling on them 
 haphazard like slant rays from driving clouds; 
 all the pages in a breeze, the whole book 
 producing a kind of electrical agitation in 
 the minds and the joints. This was its 
 effect on the lady." 
 
 It is perhaps always dangerous to attempt 
 to identify an author with any one of his 
 characters ; proof of which is to be found in 
 the 'diversity in which such a practice puts 
 different critics. Mr W. L. Courtney has 
 said that he sees Mr Meredith in Adrian 
 Harley of Richard Fever el ; I seem to see 
 him more clearly, or at least to catch feat- 
 ures of him, in the Radical doctor of 
 Bevisham. I certainly feel ready to apply 
 to Mr Meredith the words which he makes 
 Nevil speak of Shrapnel — " I maintain there 
 is wisdom in him when conventional minds 
 would think him at his wildest. Believe 
 me, he is the humanest, the best of men, 
 tender-hearted as a child : the most bene- 
 volent, simple-minded, admirable old man —
 
 THE EARLIER NO VELS 1 3 1 
 
 the man I am proudest to think of as an 
 EngHshman and a man living in my time, 
 of all men existing. I can't overpraise him." 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, the author introduces 
 us to a whole circle of well-individualised 
 people — people who are really convincing to 
 those who can appreciate character study and 
 who are not satisfied with having a story built 
 up around mere named puppets. I feel 
 that here, again, we have Mr Meredith as 
 realist in the finest sense ; as he says to- 
 wards the close of the story in one of his 
 Thackerayan asides to the reader : — 
 
 "We will make no mystery about it. I 
 would I could. Those happy tales of 
 mystery are as much my envy as the popu- 
 lar narratives of the deeds of bread and 
 cheese people, for they both create a tide- 
 way in the attentive mind ; the mysterious 
 pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the 
 familiar urging our obese imagination to 
 constitutional exercise. And oh, the re- 
 freshment there is in dealing with char-
 
 132 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 acters either contemptibly beneath us or 
 supernaturally above! My way is like a 
 Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, 
 unattractive and difficult between the two 
 forceful streams of the unreal and the over- 
 real, which delight mankind — honour to the 
 conjurers ! My people conquer nothing, 
 win none ; they are actual, yet uncommon. 
 It is the clock-work of the brain that they 
 are directed to set in motion, and — poor 
 troop of actors to vacant benches ! — the con- 
 science residing in thoughtfulness which 
 they would appeal to ; and if you are there 
 impervious to them, we are lost : back I go 
 to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I 
 have contracted the habit of listening to my 
 own voice more than is good." Between 
 the unreal and the over-real aptly describes 
 this work ; the pity of it is that such a pre- 
 ponderating majority of readers prefer those 
 extremes. 
 
 In 1877 — between the publication of 
 Beauckainfs Career and that of The Egoist
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 133 
 
 — Mr Meredith contributed a couple of short 
 stories to the New Quarterly Magazine. 
 These stories were The House on the Beach 
 and The Case of General Ople and Lady 
 Camper^ and though they remained for years 
 without being reprinted (except in America, 
 where they were to be bought for a few 
 cents), they are so delightful that the reader 
 who appreciates this cannot help regretting 
 that Mr Meredith has written so few tales 
 of this character. Full of that spirit of true 
 comedy which plays so important a part in 
 life when looked at with eyes fitted to dis- 
 cover it, the stories contain some memor- 
 able characters — unforgetable portraits, in- 
 deed, are those of Martin Tinman in the 
 first-named tale and General Ople in the 
 second. Tinman, the retired tradesman, 
 who has become an important official in a 
 small seaport, with his desire to marry and 
 his turned head consequent upon a near 
 approach to Royalty — his quaint combina- 
 tion of meanness and ambition — is a rich
 
 134 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 creation of satiric humour. While the 
 modest General who is fascinated by the 
 berouged beauty of his neighbour is a 
 characteristic addition to the Meredithian 
 portrait gallery. 
 
 In the summer of 1879 the third of Mr 
 Meredith's short stories appeared in the 
 New Quarterly Magazine, This was The 
 Tale of Chloe : an Episode in the History of 
 Beau Beamish^ a perfect piece of story- 
 telling, in which we have in the woman who 
 gives her name to the book a very striking 
 figure. Chloe is a woman who has given up 
 all to her love for a man wholly unworthy, 
 and who quietly settles down at " the Wells " 
 during the Beauship of Beamish, to await 
 the return of her faithless lover. The young 
 and unsophisticated duchess of an elderly 
 duke is anxious to see life at the Wells, and 
 the duke being past the stage of caring for 
 such frivolity, places her for a month in the 
 care of the Beau and Chloe. The young 
 and artless Duchess Susie soon has many
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 135 
 
 admirers, and among them Chloe's faithless 
 Caseldy, who soon comes to be favoured to 
 such a degree that an elopement is contem- 
 plated. Chloe determines to save her youth- 
 ful charge, and does so in a strikingly tragic 
 fashion. To summarise the story is to do it 
 an injustice, for no summary can convey the 
 growing sense of tragedy which haunts the 
 comedy of the earlier stages, the amazing 
 artistry of the whole presentation, from the 
 arrival of the Duchess of Dewlap to the 
 noble close. The Tale of Chloe now fittingly 
 occupies the first place in the volume of Mr 
 Meredith's short stories, though, like its 
 companions, it had many years to wait for 
 republication, except in a cheap series of 
 American "piracies." 
 
 For over twenty years Mr Meredith had 
 been producing his novels, yet he was 
 still known to few and admired by fewer 
 readers. Wit and poetry, marvellous por- 
 trayal of diverse characters, evidence of 
 deepest insight — these were scattered over
 
 136 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 every page of his books, and yet they re- 
 mained for the most part unrecognised. The 
 two writers who are the most characteristic 
 novelists of the Victorian era had passed 
 away, but even the consequent looking out 
 for a new avatar did not reveal what should 
 have been so obvious. George Eliot — 
 whose Ada7n Bede, as I have said, appeared 
 in the same year as The Ordeal of Richard 
 Feve7'el — had become acknowledged popu- 
 larly as the great novelist of the day, while 
 Mr Thomas Hardy had stepped into 
 popularity almost at once within the few 
 years that had elapsed since Dickens's 
 death. The position was one that might 
 have embittered a man less great than Mr 
 Meredith, but he continued steadily in his 
 path, producing of his best and putting it 
 before a thankless world for the delight and 
 benefit of a comparatively small circle. 
 
 Between the two periods into which I 
 have divided Mr Meredith's novels came the 
 very remarkable lecture which he delivered
 
 THE EARLIER NOVELS 137 
 
 before the London Institution in February 
 1877. The title of the lecture was On the 
 Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic 
 Spirit. It was subsequently published in 
 one of the reviews, and twenty years later 
 was issued in book form. The essay is a 
 subtle and penetrating piece of work, one 
 worthy to rank with the best that is in 
 literary criticism. Every page is packed 
 with thought, every line conveys a definite 
 statement elucidating the main theme. 
 Himself our greatest master of comedy, 
 he has given us a masterly exposition of 
 the theme and one which merits really close 
 study by the lover of Meredithian comedy, 
 as well as by students of literature generally. 
 Certain things, he tells us, are essential to 
 the environment of a great comic poet. " A 
 society of cultivated men and women is 
 required, wherein ideas are current and the 
 perceptions quick, that he may be supplied 
 with matter and an audience. The semi- 
 barbarism of merely giddy communities, and
 
 138 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 feverish emotional periods, repel him ; and 
 also a marked state of social inequality of 
 the sexes ; nor can he whose business is to 
 address the mind be understood where 
 there is not a moderate degree of intellectual 
 activity." The truth of that statement is 
 particularly obvious when we try it on those 
 who "can't read Meredith." Again, we are 
 told that the comic poet " must be able to 
 penetrate ; a corresponding acuteness must 
 exist to welcome him. The necessity for 
 the two conditions will explain how it is that 
 we count him during centuries in the singular 
 number." The comic poet to whom Mr Mere- 
 dith here refers is, of course, Moliere. Him- 
 self we may rank as something of a Moliere 
 in his prose works, rich as they are in the 
 light thrown on character by the comic spirit. 
 The philosopher may ever dog his steps and 
 insist upon being heard — as Dame Gossip 
 insists in the last of the novels — but then, as 
 he puts it, " Philosopher and Comic Poet are 
 of a cousinship in the eye they cast on life."
 
 IV 
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 
 
 " He has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive, 
 the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or 
 ironical or human at his pleasure ; he has passion and 
 he has imagination ; he has considered sex — the great 
 subject, the leaven of imaginative art — with notable 
 audacity and insight ... In his best work he takes 
 rank with the world's novelists. He is a companion for 
 Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and 
 Cervantes." W. E. Henley, 
 
 In 1879 it was just thirty years since Mr 
 
 Meredith had pubHshed his first Hterary 
 
 essay in the form of a poem which, as has 
 
 before been said, appeared in the columns of 
 
 Chambers s Journal ; in that thirty years he 
 
 had gone on producing work of the highest 
 
 literary value, had established himself as poet 
 
 with all who care for what is best in poetry, 
 
 and had produced, as I hope that the last 
 
 139
 
 I40 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 chapter has shown, stories numerous and 
 valuable enough to assure a great reputation 
 as novelist. Popularity was still a long way 
 off, and, indeed, the author had yet to write 
 both his greatest and his most popular 
 novels. The first, The Egoist, was pub- 
 lished in this year, while the other, Diana of 
 the Crossways, was to come half a dozen 
 years later. Never had a great novelist had 
 so lonof to wait for full recoornition. Scott, 
 Dickens and George Eliot leaped into the 
 widest popularity with their earliest works, 
 while Thackeray was not many years in 
 finding ample appreciation of his stories ; but 
 here we have the case of a man — the peer 
 of the best of that great quartet — who had 
 been producing his remarkable novels for a 
 quarter of a century, and wbo was still un- 
 known to the vast majority of his story- 
 reading countrymen and women. There 
 was, however, no attempt made by the 
 novelist to write down to the public that 
 refused as yet to come up to him, no altering
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 4 1 
 
 of the high standard with which he had set 
 out. Indeed, the novel with which he com- 
 menced this latter half of his productive 
 career was more markedly " Meredithian " 
 than any of those that had preceded it ; and 
 it was so both in the true sense of being the 
 most subtle portrayal of a character from the 
 inside and in the popular sense of opening 
 on a chapter which constitutes "difficult" 
 reading. For the most part the earlier 
 novels had beo;un with something more or 
 less directly concerning the immediate action 
 of the story, but with The Egoist we start 
 with one of those subtle studies which call 
 for more thought on the part of readers than 
 the vast majority of them care to expend on 
 the merely literary aspect of their fiction. 
 In a sense each of the novels, from The 
 Egoist onwards, is a study of the many- 
 sided marriage problem, is in a more 
 accentuated degree than usual an examina- 
 tion of the relation of the sexes. 
 
 The Egoist is a marvellous book as much
 
 142 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 for its diverse portraitures as for its re- 
 morseless delineation of an egoism fostered 
 by circumstance to an astounding degree. 
 Every biography is, of course, more or less 
 closely a page transcribed from the great 
 book of Egoism as Mr Meredith conceives 
 it, and here we have what we might call 
 the general egoism most finely shown by a 
 close study of a very prince of egoists. We 
 may not know a Sir Willoughby Patterne, but 
 yet in reading his story, in studying the 
 portrait projected from the novelist's pages, 
 we find ourselves saying how like that is to so 
 and so ; at times we feel, too, but, sheltered 
 by our own egoism, more rarely, that even we 
 ourselves contribute a scrap to the composite 
 portrait. But it is not in Sir Willoughby 
 alone that our novelist triumphs here, 
 although the baronet stands as a type with 
 the greatest figures of our greatest dramatists 
 and story-tellers ; Clara Middleton, the 
 high-spirited, strong-natured young woman 
 whose life is so nearly wrecked by the
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 143 
 
 fancied love which hurries her into an engage- 
 ment with the monster " I " of Patterne Hall, 
 is one of the most thoroughly engaging of 
 Mr Meredith's many engaging women. 
 The manner in which Sir Willoughby, while 
 gradually revealing his nature to her rapidly 
 awakening consciousness, also — but wholly 
 unconsciously — himself provides her with 
 the name which throws an illumination on 
 everything he does and says, is finely put ; 
 but, indeed, the whole is so admirable that it 
 becomes something of impertinence to cite a 
 bit, and as inconclusive as a few lines from 
 Hamlet would be in bringing before us the 
 man whom Shakespeare has given as out- 
 come of the whole tragedy. Nowhere in 
 the preceding volumes had Mr Meredith 
 made such rich use of his wonderful powers 
 of psychological analysis, although perhaps 
 in each of the novels, from Richard Feverel 
 onwards, are to be found indications of the 
 use to which those powers might be put. 
 In the smuCT self-satisfaction of Sir Austin
 
 144 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Feverel it seems easy, after the fact, to 
 foresee something of the character of Sir 
 Willoughby Patterne, as in the Lady Jocelyn 
 and Rose of Evan Ha7'ringion, the Janet 
 Ilchester of Beauckamfs Career and the 
 title heroines of Rhoda Fleming and 
 Sandra Belloni we may read fore- 
 shadowings of the perfect woman nobly 
 planned, Clara Middleton. Sandra may 
 remain one's favourite among Mere- 
 dithian heroines, but surely woman was 
 never more subtly and beautifully repre- 
 sented in the whole range of fiction than 
 in Clara. We feel, indeed, that fiction is 
 scarcely the right word to use here, so true 
 is the psychology, so absolutely real are the 
 men and women who are revealed to us, so 
 natural are the scenes amid which they 
 move and the circumstances which arise 
 from their relations. Mr Meredith called 
 his House on the Beach "a realistic tale," 
 as thouo^h differentiatino^ it thus from its 
 companions, but in truth the adjective would
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 145 
 
 better apply to most of those others. 
 Realistic is, of course, a word that has been 
 prostituted from its nicest meaning during 
 the present generation, and especially so when 
 applied to literature and art. It has been so 
 often applied to stories dealing with mani- 
 festations of man's lower nature that at 
 last it has come to be imagined that only 
 that lower nature is the real, a view as 
 obviously false as it is one-sided. I should 
 say that The Egoist is a piece of uncompro- 
 mising realism — the realism neither of the 
 gutter nor of the shambles, but the realism 
 of ordinary life as seen through the eyes of a 
 man who can see into things, can read the 
 meaning underlying acts and words with a 
 remarkable power undreamed of by the vast 
 majority of his fellows. 
 
 In the earlier stories something of the 
 extravagance of romance was introduced 
 — in the union of Richard and Lucy in 
 Richard Feverel, in the whole circumstance 
 of the young tailor thrown among county 
 
 K
 
 146 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 magnates in Evan Harrington, In the careers 
 of Sandra Belloni and of Harry Richmond, 
 in the political adventures of Nevil Beau- 
 champ. Here, however, extravagance of 
 romantic incident or of incongruous persons 
 brought together are not depended upon ; 
 the whole comedy, which is absorbingly 
 interesting, is worked, so to speak, from the 
 inside, from the psychological realisation 
 of a number of persons brought by birth 
 or by perfectly natural circumstances into 
 relation with each other. After reading a 
 few chapters we find ourselves wondering 
 not what will happen next in the way in 
 which ordinary story-wrights arouse our 
 wonder, but what the folk will be saying or 
 doing next. We find ourselves looking out 
 for nicest shades in the language showing 
 the development of matters, as in real life, 
 in a time of crisis, v/e may feel the atmo- 
 sphere electrical, and know that things said 
 convey more than their obvious meaning. 
 (A state, by the way, which is marvellously
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 4 7 
 
 indicated by Mr Meredith in the forty-third 
 chapter of Rlioda Fleming!) 
 
 In its machinery the story has all the 
 simplicity of a classic tragedy : a richly- 
 dowered young man is the central study, and 
 his search for a wife the principal theme, 
 every incident in the history being shown in 
 its bearing upon the individuality of the 
 Egoist. Adulated, almost worshipped, by 
 his immediate family circle, Sir Willoughby 
 has somethincr of the arrogance of a 
 young god, combined with something 
 of the almost savage selfishness of 
 a feudal kinglet. It comes out in every- 
 thing, though primarily, of course, in his 
 relations with women, and therefore the 
 reader cannot but rejoice that the irony of 
 circumstance makes him finally unite him- 
 self with the long-loving but at last dis- 
 illusionised woman whose homage he has 
 accepted for years as nothing less than his 
 lordly due. Close as is the attention given 
 to the presentation of Sir Willoughby and
 
 148 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Clara Middleton, it is by no means a story 
 of two alone. Crossjay is a hearty, generous, 
 full-blooded boy, as real to us as our own 
 nephews. Mrs Mountstuart-Jenkinson, with 
 her quickness of perception, her nimbleness 
 of wit, is as a veritable addition to the 
 gallery of women given us by eighteenth- 
 century comedy. Vernon, Horace de 
 Craye, Dr Middleton, Laetitia — these folk 
 crowd upon us as we muse over the story, 
 as old friends crowd npon the memory 
 when we think of some bygone period of 
 our own lives. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson's views on the 
 novel are interesting, and his experience 
 may be commended to those who do not 
 understand The Egoist on a first reading — 
 let them read it again ; those who do 
 appreciate it will need no such advice : — 
 
 " Talking of Meredith, I have just re- 
 read for the third and fourth time The 
 Egoist. When I shall have read it the 
 sixth or seventh I begin to see I shall
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 149 
 
 know about it. You will be astonished 
 when you come to read it ; I had no idea 
 of the matter — human, red matter he has 
 contrived to plug and pack into that strange 
 and admirable book. Willoughby is, of 
 course, a pure discovery ; a complete set 
 of nerves, not heretofore examined, and yet 
 running all over the human body — a suit 
 of nerves. Clara is the best girl I ever 
 saw anywhere. Vernon is almost as good. 
 The manner and the faults of the book 
 greatly justify themselves on further study. 
 Only Dr Middleton does not hang together ; 
 and Ladies Busshe and Culmer sont des 
 monstrosites. Vernon's conduct makes a 
 wonderful odd contrast with Daniel 
 Deronda's. I see more and more that 
 Meredith is built for immortality." 
 
 How much truer is this insistence that 
 we should read and re-read our great 
 novelist than the cheap sneer of those who 
 do not find, to use a phrase of Cowper's, 
 the meaning staring them in the face, and
 
 ISO GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 who repeat, in accents now patronising and 
 now indignant, such phrases as the follow- 
 ing comment on Mr Meredith's very first 
 published book: — "This predisposition to- 
 wards strangeness for strang-eness' sake is 
 evident, and very frequently the compHca- 
 tion appears to have been sought at the' 
 expense of meaning rather than elucidation." 
 Two years after The Egoist came The 
 Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well- 
 known Story ^ wherein the novelist presented 
 in his own fashion the narrative of the 
 later life, love and death of that remark- 
 able reformer, Ferdinand Lassalle. History — 
 certainly nineteenth-century history — affords 
 no more romantic episode than that of the 
 later years of Lassalle, and to Mr Meredith 
 the romance has given a fine opportunity 
 for psychological analysis, and for the 
 presentation of a chapter of life's tragi- 
 comedy, of Nature's fantastical : — 
 
 "The pair of tragic comedians of whom 
 there will be question pass under this word
 
 THE LA TER NO VEL S 151 
 
 as under their banner and motto. Their 
 acts are incredible : they drank sunlight 
 and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse 
 historical couples upon our planet. Yet 
 they do belong to history, they breathed 
 the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter 
 of them is written in red blood, and the 
 man pouring out that last chapter was of 
 a mighty nature not unheroical — a man of 
 the active grappling modern brain which 
 wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, 
 and can create them, to set it spinning. 
 A Faust-like legend might spring from 
 him : he had a devil. He was the leader 
 of a host, the hope of a party, venerated 
 by his followers, well hated by his enemies, 
 respected by the intellectual chiefs of his 
 time, in the pride of his manhood and his 
 labours when he fell. And why this man 
 should have come to his end through love, 
 and the woman who loved him have laid 
 her hand in the hand of the slayer, is 
 the problem we have to study, nothing
 
 152 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 inventing, in the spirit and flesh of 
 both." 
 
 By one reading this book for the first 
 time, and ignorant of the story of Ferdinand 
 Lassalle's Hfe, these words are Hkely to 
 be taken as part of the fiction — a not un- 
 usual trick on the part of lesser writers to 
 increase the vraisemblance of their work 
 — but here they are literally true, as the 
 briefest summary of Lassalle's biography 
 will suffice to show. Mr Meredith has 
 taken his characters and his incidents from 
 actual life, then, and has given us some 
 triumphant portraiture. If the book were 
 pure fiction we should be disappointed at 
 the action of the harassed heroine, but as 
 it is pure fact we are the rather saddened 
 at the weakness of poor humanity. 
 
 With his next story Mr Meredith came, 
 I believe, as near to popular success as 
 with any of his books immediately on their 
 publication. The story was Diana of the 
 Crossways, and the secret of its appeal to
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 5 3 
 
 the taste of the circulating Hbraries is not 
 far to seek ; it is to be found in the con- 
 nection which was immediately suggested 
 between one of Diana's actions and the 
 actions of the Hon. Mrs Caroline Norton, 
 a famous literary beauty of the mid- 
 nineteenth century. That connection has, 
 I fancy, been disclaimed by the author, 
 but it had done its work in hinting that 
 a real scandal might be at the back of 
 the fiction, a hint which supplies sufficient 
 incentive to a lar^e number of readers. 
 The opening chapter must, it may well be 
 imagined, have been something of a surprise 
 to many people accustomed to simpler 
 forms of expression and to more attenuated 
 thoughts. It is a " Meredithian " introduction 
 to the story. This may be suggestive of 
 difficulty to the inappreciative, but it is 
 really equal to saying that it strikes the 
 keynote of the chapters which follow. Here 
 are suofofested at once the character of the 
 heroine, the circumstances of her surround-
 
 154 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 ings, and a hint may be gathered of the 
 course of her Hfe-story. In what points 
 of similarity that story coincides with that 
 of the Hfe of the beautiful CaroHne Norton 
 can easily be seen by a comparison with any 
 biographical sketch of that gifted and 
 unhappy lady : Diana was an Irishwoman, 
 so was Mrs Norton; Diana was the daughter 
 of a wit of some reputation, and Mrs Norton 
 was the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley 
 Sheridan ; Diana married, with the un- 
 happiest results, a man whom she scarcely 
 knew, and so also did her suggested 
 prototype ; Diana was made respondent, 
 and a political chief co-respondent in a 
 wholly unjustifiable divorce case, and here, 
 too, we have a close parallel with the 
 ridiculous suit instituted by Caroline Norton's 
 husband against herself and Lord Melbourne. 
 There is, however, no need to follow these 
 similarities too closely, nor to imagine that 
 because certain romantic incidents of Mrs 
 Norton's career are pressed into the service
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 5 5 
 
 of the novelist that therefore all the incidents 
 of the novel are taken from Mrs Norton's 
 career. Such reasoning has been suggested, 
 but it is, of course, wholly unsound. 
 
 Diana is a charming creation, full of Irish 
 wit and whimsicality ; she enlists a champion 
 under her banner in nearly every fresh 
 reader of her story. " She is one of 
 Shakespeare's women " — the words of her 
 friend, Lady Dunstane, are true — "another 
 character, but one of his own, another 
 Hermione ! " Her story is that of unsuit- 
 able marriage, one of the most tragical 
 things known to our civilisation, and the 
 tragedy is here the worse for being brought 
 about by the action of the husband of 
 Diana's dearest friend, one of those idle 
 hands for which mischief is always readily 
 provided. Alarmed at one man's behaviour, 
 she looks upon marriage as the only safe- 
 guard from a predatory sex, and therefore 
 marries a man of whom she knows but little, 
 the tenant of her Sussex home, The Cross-
 
 156 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 ways. Soon, indeed, she finds her last state 
 is worse than her first. Describing the posi- 
 tion to Lady Dunstane, she herself says : 
 " He has not cause to like his wife. I can 
 own it, and I am sorry for it, heartily. No 
 two have ever come together so naturally 
 antagonistic as we two. We walked a 
 dozen steps in stupefied union, and hit upon 
 crossways. From that moment it was tug 
 and tug ; he me, I him. By resisting, I 
 made him a tyrant ; and he by insisting 
 made me a rebel. And he was the maddest 
 of tyrants — a weak one." Here we see the 
 double significance of the title of the novel 
 in the crossways of matrimony as well as 
 the name of the heroine's birthplace. 
 Married and separated from her wholly 
 uncongenial mate, her position is worse than 
 it was before, and more particularly when 
 something of passion is aroused in her by 
 the young politician, Percy Dacier ; with him, 
 indeed, she is sorely tempted to fly and give 
 her leo^al husband good cause for renewing:
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS \ 57 
 
 his efforts at release from their chain. Percy 
 was not, however, worthy, and happily the 
 hastily-designed elopement was prevented 
 by the illness of Diana's friend, and so in the 
 course of time the unworthiness of Dacier is 
 made plain and the true hero of the story 
 wins his fitting mate. The story as love- 
 romance holds the reader's attention more 
 closely than Mr Meredith's stories are wont 
 to do, but it is in its central figure of a great 
 woman greatly delineated that Diana of the 
 Crossways most deeply impresses us. A few 
 words, too, must be spared for Thomas Red- 
 worth, the sterling friend, the constant 
 lover ; a man in whom the novelist has 
 portrayed a strong, wholesome Englishman — 
 a typical Saxon, as Diana somewhere calls 
 him. It is to him and to Lady Dunstane 
 that Diana owes everything after her rash 
 acceptance of Mr Warwick as her husband, 
 as it is to his level-headedness perhaps that 
 he owes the long postponement of his own 
 happiness.
 
 158 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Rhoda Fleming, it will be remembered, 
 closed on Dahlia's pathetic injunction to her 
 brother-in-law, "Help poor girls,"* and so 
 it is that the reading of Diana of the Cross- 
 ways impresses us with another aspect of 
 what has been foolishly called the woman 
 question, and to Diana it is given to make 
 a pertinent suggestion on the economic 
 subjection of women — a suggestion that has 
 less of novelty about it now than when it 
 was written some seventeen years ago : 
 " That is the secret of the opinion of us at 
 present — our dependency. Give us the 
 means of independence and we will gain it, 
 and have a turn at judging you, my lords ! 
 You shall behold a world reversed. When- 
 ever I am distracted by existing circum- 
 stances I lay my finger on the material 
 conditions, and I touch the secret. In- 
 dividually, it may be moral with us ; 
 collectively, it is material — gross wrongs, 
 
 * " He is good to women," is Nataly's eloquent tribute to 
 Dartrey Fenellan in 07te of Our Conquerors.
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 159 
 
 gross hungers. I am a married rebel, and 
 thereof comes the social rebel. I was 
 once a dancing and singing girl." 
 
 Mr Meredith's feeling for the character- 
 istics of scenery, and his love for the county 
 he has so long made his home, come out 
 very strongly in this story. His scenes 
 about the Italian lakes, Percy's and Diana's 
 early morning walk on the lovely Generoso, 
 are unforsfetable. No less remarkable are 
 the bits of Surrey scenery here given, 
 notably where Redworth has his night 
 ride from Copsley to the Crossways, and 
 later, where Diana and her friend drive 
 along the chalk downs running parallel with 
 the southern sandy ridge, the whole stretch 
 of country is brought to the memory of any- 
 one who has once seen it by the description, 
 now comprehensive and now minute, but 
 always revealing. 
 
 For his next novel Mr Meredith took a 
 title from near the conclusion of one of his 
 own short stories. Lady Camper has been
 
 i6o GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 discussino- matters with her nervous neiofh- 
 hour and caricaturing him the while. ** ' So 
 you may suppose I have studied you,' said 
 she. ' But there is no real likeness. Slight 
 exaoforerations do more harm to truth than 
 reckless violations of it. You would not 
 have cared one bit for a caricature if you 
 had not nursed the absurd idea of being one 
 of our conquerors. It is the very tragedy 
 of modesty for a man like you to have 
 such notions, my poor, dear, good friend. 
 The modest are the most easily intoxi- 
 cated when they sip at vanity ! ' " 
 
 The " one of our conquerors " of the 
 novel is Victor Radnor, an egoist of a more 
 genial type than Sir Willoughby Patterne, 
 a wealthy City man who dazzles the world 
 with his successes, who is the centre of a 
 delightful circle of friends, who has a win- 
 some mate in Nataly, a lovable daughter in 
 Nesta. They are all musical amateurs of 
 great ability, and Victor's might appear to 
 be the most perfect life but that there is a
 
 THE LATER NOVELS i6i 
 
 skeleton in the Radnor cupboard, a skeleton 
 which incessantly distresses Nataly and only 
 reflectedly disturbs him. It is the story of 
 Two who have defied the Law of the Land 
 that they may conform to the Laws of Love, 
 and of the tragic result thereof. To many 
 readers One of Our Co7iquero7^s is a greater 
 stumbling-block than any other of its author's 
 works, and his greatest admirers will readily 
 admit that in it Mr Meredith is at times 
 more involved, more cryptic, than he had 
 been before. The opening chapter is 
 particularly uninviting to those who would 
 read while they are running, but those who 
 are content to do one thing at a time will 
 find much in the volume to reward them. 
 It is a thoroughly characteristic story of the 
 writer's, although in it there is an accentua- 
 tion of his least admirable literary qualities, 
 his fondness for bovrilising thought— if I 
 may be forgiven the word — into so small a 
 compass of words that the sentences are 
 really too " meaty." Yet despite the
 
 i62 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 difficulties of the language — and it is 
 curious that in his later books, when the 
 public was beginning to take a real interest 
 in his work, Mr Meredith should, as though 
 wilfully, have increased the difficulties of his 
 literary expression — the novel will well 
 reward the patient reader, and no other 
 reader deserves rewarding. The whole 
 story turns upon the union of a pair that 
 could not marry, the man having in his 
 youth married a woman much older than 
 himself and then having eloped with the 
 one for whom he had a genuine passion. It 
 is a pathetic story, for the reader's interest is 
 wholly with the irregular couple, so much so 
 that it is with something of disappointment 
 that we reach the end and find the longed- 
 for death of the old legal wife came five and 
 a half hours too late. But Mr Meredith 
 never wrote for the "average novel-reader" 
 of the reviewers ; he is at once too true as 
 an artist and too close an observer of life to 
 do so, and we feel that such an end as the
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 163 
 
 book orives mio:ht well have been the end 
 to such a chapter of human life, one of those 
 chapters which occasioned the proverb 
 that tells man, to his doubtful comforting, 
 how though he may propose it is God who 
 disposes. 
 
 Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance — many 
 are the notable if not always simple utter- 
 ances which are put in the mouths of these 
 two of the characters of the story on whom 
 the author fathers so many of his wise 
 witticisms, his terse utterances on men and 
 the relations of men. In lighter characters 
 we have, what we so often have in these 
 novels, that touch of over-stressing which 
 makes caricature, the most notable example 
 here being the messenger Skepsey, who sees 
 England's degeneration in the desuetude of 
 the fistic science, and who, taken before a 
 magistrate for assaulting his wife, explains 
 to him that he was only giving the woman a 
 necessary lesson in the art of self-defence. 
 The elements of caricature are given in
 
 i64 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 some of the friends of the Radnor house- 
 hold, especially in Miss Graves and Mr 
 Pempton, the lady and gentleman who each 
 had a cure for most human ills in the abstin- 
 ence from meat and strong drinks respec- 
 tively. A bit of drollery unusual in these 
 pages is given where Simeon Fenellan says: — 
 " I'll own I feel envious ; like the girl 
 among a family of boys I knew, who were 
 all of them starved in their infancy by a 
 miserly father, that gave them barely a bit 
 of Graves to eat and not a drop of Pempton 
 to drink ; and on the afternoon of his 
 funeral I found them in the drawing-room, 
 four lank fellows, heels up, walking on their 
 hands, from long practice ; and the girl in- 
 formed me that her brothers were able to 
 send the little blood they had in their bodies 
 to their brains and always felt quite cheerful 
 for it, happy, and empowered to deal with 
 the problems of the universe, as they 
 couldn't on their legs ; but she, poor thing, 
 was forbidden to do the same."
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 165 
 
 This is but an illustration used by one 
 of the book's witty characters, but it is 
 evidence of the novelist's more boisterous 
 humour — of the subtle kind each of his 
 novels affords abundance of examples. It is 
 by no means characteristic of this particular 
 story ; far more characteristic is the rencontre 
 between Nesta when staying at Brighton 
 and Mrs Marsett, a lady at whom the world 
 points the finger which — given the cue — 
 would be pointed no less ruthlessly at 
 Nesta's own mother. Perhaps the serious 
 close is foreshadowed from the first ; there 
 is certainly much of the irony of life shown 
 in the position of the beautiful Nataly who, 
 happily situated as those who see her in 
 the world can but think, is yet haunted by 
 the falseness of the appearance which she 
 is makinof. It is true that her love — and 
 her loving and impetuous husband — 
 justifies her position in her own regard, but 
 the world has hot words aiid cold looks for 
 those who sin against the conventions, while
 
 i66 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 the situation is accentuated by the question 
 of the daughter grown to young womanhood 
 and wooed by conventionality personified 
 in a scion of the Peerage. Beautiful, indeed, 
 are these two women, and it is with genuine 
 sorrow that we see the elder one die a few 
 hours before the death of the old eccentric 
 whom she had supplanted years before in 
 the affections of Victor Radnor. Victor and 
 his loving Nataly gambled for a certain 
 event, the death of Mrs Burman, thinking 
 to date their fullest happiness from that 
 event, but fate willed that the weak should 
 outlive the strong. The reader, if saddened 
 over the fate of Nataly and Victor, feels 
 that Nesta receives the best that could be in 
 marriage with Dartrey Fenellan, the strong 
 and healthy friend to whom Nataly had 
 always hoped to see her daughter united. 
 
 With Lo7'd Ormont and His Aminta we 
 come to yet another aspect of the marriage 
 question. In the story which had immedi- 
 ately preceded it the author had, as we
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 167 
 
 have seen, shown us a young man married 
 to a woman greatly his senior, and breaking 
 the matrimonial tie on subsequently falling 
 in love with a woman more fittingly designed 
 by nature to be his mate. In the new story 
 the well-fitted pair meet at the earliest time 
 of awakening affection, meet only to be 
 separated by indignant friends and guardians, 
 and to meet again when she is married to a 
 man forty years older than herself — a man 
 who is at once one of the most noted 
 military leaders of his time, a discredited 
 general and the hero of Matey Weyburn's 
 boyish adoration. The problem which early 
 faces the reader is, how will the two 
 behave — this man and woman who as boy 
 and girl had eyed one another on the 
 weekly march-out of their schools ? A 
 natural train of circumstances takes Matey — '- 
 before launching out into schoolmasterdom 
 — as secretary to his military idol, and so 
 throws him into touch with the Countess, 
 in whom he finds the Aminta (" Browny "
 
 i68 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 of school days) of his constant affections. 
 Loyalty is a strong feature of Weyburn's 
 individuality, and he keeps loyal to himself 
 and his employer, and it is purely by force of 
 circumstances that he is driven to the course 
 which he finally adopts. Less crowded than 
 most of its companion volumes, Lord Ormont 
 and His Ammta has four remarkable char- 
 acters in the title folks, in Matey Weyburn 
 and in Lord Ormont's sister, Lady Charlotte 
 Eglett. Said Matey of the last-named lady, 
 ** She's one of the living women of the world," 
 and the saying is applicable to so many of 
 Mr Meredith's creations — they are living 
 women who are made real to us in a way 
 that many successful writers of fiction must 
 envy. Aminta, as heroine, has a more 
 conventional part to play — though in the 
 long-run she plays it unconventionally. 
 Fine, indeed, is the obstinate, markedly 
 individual, kindly, thoroughly human Lady 
 Charlotte — the womanly expression of the 
 qualities that won Lord Ormont his honours
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 169 
 
 and also placed him under a cloud, but not 
 possessed of that strain of blind eccentricity 
 which makes Lord Ormont, while quarrelling 
 with his country, place his young wife in a 
 cruelly invidious position. It is perhaps 
 quite in accord with the irony of things that 
 it is the weaknesses of Lord Ormont's own 
 strono- character which brino^ about the ruin 
 of his life — for " often a man's own angry 
 pride is cap and bells to a fool." It is his 
 strength, however, and not his weakness 
 that comes out when he is thrown by 
 chance in the company of his ex-secretary 
 and the near neighbourhood of his eloped 
 Aminta, and when he acts with a magnan- 
 imity which is not superhuman, but is so 
 strikinor as to increase the reader's admiration 
 for him, and the more so that his character 
 has been so subtly presented that before 
 the situation is fully explained one is 
 prophetically conscious of how the old 
 nobleman is about to act. Rarely beautiful 
 is the swimming chapter towards the end of
 
 I70 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 this Story — ^memory-haunting as the river- 
 side chapter of Richard Fever el, the picnic 
 scenes of Evan Harrington, the Monte 
 Motterone chapter of Vittoria, the flight to 
 the Crossways of Diana, and the lake-storm 
 of Harry Richinond. 
 
 The laws which govern the mating of the 
 sexes once more afforded Mr Meredith his 
 theme in the last story of this remarkable 
 series. The title is frankly The Amazing 
 Marriage, piquing at once the curiosity of 
 readers of the two immediately precedent. 
 The theme, the manner, are widely different. 
 We have a novel — one of the longest which 
 Mr Meredith has written — irradiated with 
 the peculiar atmosphere of comedy which 
 glorifies the pages of the short history of 
 General Ople. A story in which, before 
 half-way through, we are called upon to 
 witness some remarkable evolutions in the 
 history of the amazing heroine; "one could 
 almost laugh at our human fate, to think of a 
 drop off the radiant mountain heights upon a
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 171 
 
 Whitechapel greengrocer's shop, gathering 
 the title of Countess midway." The last of 
 Mr Meredith's novels, I find this one of the 
 most fascinating ; it has about it something 
 of the glamour of irresponsible romance, 
 which is one of the charms of The Adven- 
 tures of Harry Richmo7id ; it is so full of 
 wild improbabilities made real by the story- 
 teller ; it is so crowded with real full-blooded 
 individualities, with men and women of 
 strong character, the interplay of whose 
 personalities forms a wonderful series of 
 chapters. 
 
 To account for what I have called the 
 glamour of irresponsible romance. Mr 
 Meredith tells part of the story through 
 the lips of Dame Gossip — thus making hints 
 and allusions often supply the place of 
 definite narrative. In the closing sentences 
 the author explains that the book has been 
 "an effort to render events as consequent to 
 your understanding as a piece of logic, 
 through an exposure of character." The
 
 172 GEORGE MEkEDlTH 
 
 characters most closely exposed by subtle 
 analysis and presentment are the two parties 
 to the amazing marriage, the over-wealthy, 
 weak, young English nobleman and the 
 strong Carinthia Jane Kirby, the daughter 
 of an English exile domiciled in Austria, 
 fruit, with her brother Chillon John, of an 
 earlier amazing marriage following on a 
 great scandal in early life. Carinthia is 
 another of "Meredith's women," those 
 finely-gifted creatures to know whom, even 
 but in the pages of fiction, is a liberal educa- 
 tion in the humanities ; she is a worthy 
 companion of Sandra Belloni — another such 
 unsophisticated, sweet-natured girl dowered 
 with all excellent qualities, and though tried 
 in the most terrible fashion, proving herself 
 equal to every trial. It is a most romantic 
 part which she has to play. The child of an 
 old English naval officer, voluntary exile in 
 the Austrian military service, and of the 
 young Countess who had eloped with him, 
 Carinthia is brought up unconventionally.
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 173 
 
 Left an orphan, she is returning to England 
 with her brother, who has a commission in 
 the British Army, and she dances at a ball 
 with the wealthy, young, eccentric Earl of 
 Fleetwood. In the dance he asks her to 
 marry him, and she promptly consents. 
 Later she knows nothing of his efforts to 
 get released from his word, and readily 
 marries him on her miserly uncle insisting 
 on the union taking place. An unconven- 
 tional wedding is followed by a more 
 unconventional honeymoon, beginning 
 with a prize-fight, which the groom and 
 bride witness from the top of a coach. 
 They are then driven to a village inn and 
 the groom leaves her, and — but for a mid- 
 night visit to her by means of a ladder — 
 leaves her alone with a Welsh maid until 
 she is forced to try to see him. Then 
 the comedy begins to develop rapidly, and 
 Dame Gossip has much to say of the 
 wealthy nobleman pursued by his White- 
 chapel Countess. Fleetwood is an eccentric
 
 174 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 whose behaviour — excused in the man of 
 vast means — would receive from many folks 
 a harsher name than eccentricity, and his 
 flounderings would be amusing if it were not 
 for the tragic significance of its bearing on 
 the character of the wife whom he had 
 married merely because he had given his 
 word to do so. She loves him, but his 
 actions ever go to increasing the tenuity of 
 the bond, while he, on the contrary, when he 
 does meet her, finds himself ever feeling 
 more and more of an affection for her, until 
 the positions become almost insensibly 
 changed and the loving husband wooingly 
 pursued the frigidly friendly wife. 
 
 The closing pages have somewhat of a 
 disappointment in them, for Fleetwood's 
 share in the final rupture, which sends 
 Carinthia with her loved brother to Spain 
 and himself to a monastery, is not indicated 
 with sufficient clearness to the reader, while 
 to be told, as we are in the penultimate 
 paragraph, that Carinthia married her Welsh
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 175 
 
 friend, Owain Wythan, comes as something of 
 a shock, though the union of complex and 
 simple might have proved happy. In the 
 Welsh scenes we feel that we have in 
 Carinthia another Diana Warwick, while her 
 relations with her invalid friend, Rebecca 
 Wythan, are reminiscent of Diana's inter- 
 course with Emma Dunstane. 
 
 It is an amazing story, alike in the wild 
 whirl of its incidents and its hovering ever 
 upon the borderland of the almost un- 
 believably romantic, and in the wealth 
 and the diversity of its characters, with 
 in the oft-quoted "Old Buccaneer," his 
 daughter Carinthia, her maid Madge, and 
 the young philosopher Gower Woodseer, 
 four that are unforgetable ; but others, 
 Ines, the prize-fighter. Chummy Potts and 
 Abrane, the toady " Ixionides " of the man 
 of wealth, are striking additions to such a 
 diverse gallery of greatly-imagined and con- 
 sistently-drawn characters as no novelist has 
 exceeded.
 
 176 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 It is with something of a painful feeling 
 that one lays down The Amazing Marriage, 
 the last of that series of great novels, 
 painful because it is the last, although it 
 is also part of a whole which may be 
 described as a never-ending intellectual 
 feast where whoso can enjoy the best 
 may ever find a welcome and fresh delights. 
 To the palates that can get a sufficient 
 enjoyment out of scraps, the best fruits of 
 the earth are unknown, and so to those 
 who find their best entertainment in the 
 " books of the hour " — the fugacities of 
 fiction — I would not recommend the novels 
 of Mr Meredith ; but to those who can 
 recognise and appreciate poetry, to those 
 who can appreciate the work of a subtle 
 reader of human character unexcelled since 
 Shakespeare, to those who seek in fiction 
 a stimulant and not an opiate, I would say 
 study Mr Meredith. And be it ever re- 
 membered that, as Miss Louise Imogen 
 Guiney has put it, " Mr Meredith's influence
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 17^ 
 
 in our own day is not such as will induce 
 you to sit shaking your maudlin head over 
 yourself and all creation." 
 
 When, having read all the novels, we come 
 to consider Mr Meredith, we find ourselves 
 contemplating one of the greatest masters 
 in the art which he has expounded better 
 than any other writer I know of — the art 
 of Comedy. In the realm of richest comedy 
 The Egoist, Evan Harrington^ The Ad- 
 ventures of Harry Rich7nond, and other 
 of these novels are rich indeed. Nor is 
 it merely, to adopt the language of the 
 dramatic critics, in the comedy of situation 
 that he is among the best — in the clash of 
 words, the interplay of intellectual wit, he 
 is no less great ; one writer has claimed 
 for him — and not without consideration — 
 that he is the orreatest wit in English 
 literature, adding that Sheridan is not 
 visible beside him. Apart from his wit, 
 however, we find him a writer of the most 
 robustly invigorating qualities, who, in the 
 
 M
 
 178 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 richness and variety of his metaphorical 
 illustrations, is without a better, whose subtle 
 penetration into the motives of human 
 action is so realistic as to be something of 
 a new force in that department of philosophy 
 which we call fiction — "our closest in- 
 structors, the true philosophers, the story- 
 tellers, in short." 
 
 One of the earliest writers who 
 preached Meredith, the clever and un- 
 happy James Thomson, thought him 
 to be " rather a man's than a woman's 
 writer " because so strongly humoristic 
 and ironical, but I think that if a poll of 
 his appreciators could be taken one sex 
 would not be found preponderating so greatly 
 over the other, and it is certainly of interest 
 to remember that one of the first two books 
 devoted to a study of our greatest man of 
 letters, and published almost simultaneously, 
 was written by a woman, Miss Hannah 
 Lynch. James Thomson it was who also 
 first spoke of Meredith as " the Robert
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 179 
 
 Browning of our novelists " — a description 
 which is more deeply true than might be 
 imagined by those who see in it nothing 
 but a stressing of the difficulty of the two 
 — and one ably supported in the capital 
 summing-up which " B. V." wrote: — 
 
 " He may be termed, accurately enough 
 for a brief indication, the Robert Browning 
 of our novelists ; and his day is bound to 
 come, as Browning's at length has come. 
 The flaccid and feeble folk, who want 
 literature and art that can be inhaled as 
 idly as the perfume of a flower, must 
 naturally shrink from two such earnestly 
 strenuous spirits, swifter than eagles, 
 stronger than lions, in whom, to use the 
 magnificent and true language of Coleridge 
 concerning Shakespeare, ' the intellectual 
 power and the creative energy wrestle as 
 in a war-embrace.' But men who have 
 lived and observed and pondered, who love 
 intellect and genius and genuine passion, 
 who have eyes and ears ever open to the
 
 i8o GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 mysterious miracles of nature and art, who 
 flinch not from keenest insight into the 
 world and life, who are wont to probe and 
 analyse with patient subtlety the intricate 
 social and personal problems of our complex 
 quasi-civilisation, who look not to mere plot 
 as the be-all and end-all of a novel reflecting 
 human character and life, who willingly 
 dispense with the childish sugar-plums of 
 so-called poetical justice which they never 
 find dispensed in the grown-up work-o'-day 
 world, who can respond with thought to 
 thought, and passion to passion, and 
 imagination to imagination, and, lastly, who 
 can appreciate a style vital and plastic 
 as the ever-evolving, living world it 
 depicts, equal to all emergencies, who 
 can revel with clowns and fence with 
 fine ladies and gentlemen, yes, rise to all 
 grandeurs of Nature and Destiny and the 
 human soul in fieriest passion and action ; 
 such men, who cannot abound anywhere, 
 but who should be less rare among
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 8 1 
 
 meditative smokers than in the rest of the 
 community, will find a royal treasure-house 
 of delight and instruction and suggestion 
 in the works of George Meredith." 
 
 Mr Meredith's own views of philosophy 
 in fiction and of his own presentation 
 thereof may be culled from various parts of 
 his own writings. "The philosopher here 
 peremptorily demands the pulpit," he some- 
 where says, and early in Sandra Belloni he 
 gives a pertinent piece of parenthetical 
 self-criticism in "The philosopher (I would 
 keep him back if I could)." If he had done 
 so he would have ceased to be the novelist 
 we know and glory in. Further on in the 
 same story we read, in a conversation 
 between Cornelia Pole and Mr Barrett, 
 a pertinent bit apropos of the work of Mr 
 Tracy Runningbrooke — in whom I cannot 
 help feeling that Mr Meredith has sketched 
 some of the features of Mr Algernon 
 Charles Swinburne : — 
 
 " ' The point to be considered is, whether
 
 i82 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 fiction demands a perfectly smooth surface. 
 Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a 
 philosophical treatise should. When we ask 
 for facts simply, we feel the intrusion of a 
 style. Of fiction it is part. In the one case 
 the classical robe, in the other any mediaeval 
 phantasy of clothing.' 
 
 "'Yes; true,' said Cornelia, hesitating 
 over her argument. ' Well, I must conclude 
 that I am not imaginative.' 
 
 " * On the contrary, permit me to say that 
 you are. But your imagination is un- 
 practised and asks to be fed with a spoon. 
 We English are more imaginative than most 
 nations.' 
 
 " * Then, why is it not manifested ? ' 
 " * We are still fighting against the Puritan 
 element in literature as elsewhere.' 
 " ' Your old bugbear, Mr Barrett.' 
 " ' And more than this : our language is 
 not rich in subtleties for prose. A writer 
 who is not servile and has insight must coin 
 from his own mint. In poetry we are rich
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 183 
 
 enough ; but in prose also we owe every- 
 thing to the Hcense our poets have taken in 
 the teeth of critics.' " 
 
 Mr Meredith returns to his partnership 
 with the " Philosopher " towards the close 
 of the same book : — 
 
 " Loath am I to continue my partnership 
 with a fellow who will not see things on the 
 surface, and is, as a necessary consequence, 
 blind to the fact that the public detest him. 
 I mean, this garrulous super-subtle, so-called 
 Philosopher, who first set me upon the 
 building of the three volumes, it is true, 
 but whose stipulation that he should occupy 
 so large a portion of them has made them 
 rock top-heavy, to the forfeit of their 
 stability. He maintained that a story should 
 not always flow, or, at least, not to a given 
 measure. When we are knapsack on back, 
 he says, we come to eminences where a survey 
 of our journey past and in advance is desir- 
 able, as is a distinct pause in any business, 
 here and there. He points proudly to the
 
 iS4 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 fact that our people in this comedy move 
 themselves — are moved from their own 
 impulsion — and that no arbitrary hand has 
 posted them to bring about any event and 
 heap the catastrophe. In vain I tell him 
 that he is meantime making tatters of the 
 puppets' golden robe — illusion : that he is 
 sucking the blood of their warm humanity 
 out of them. He promises that when 
 Emilia is in Italy he will retire altogether ; 
 for there is a field of action, of battles and 
 conspiracies, nerve and muscle, where life 
 fights for plain issues, and he can but sum 
 results. Let us, he entreats, be true to time 
 and place. In our fat England the gardener 
 Time is playing all sorts of delicate freaks 
 in the hues and traceries of the flower 
 of life, and shall we not note them? If we 
 are to understand our species, and mark 
 the progress of civilisation at all, we must. 
 Thus the Philosopher. Our partner is 
 our master, and I submit, hopefully looking 
 for release with my Emilia in the day when
 
 THE LA TER NO VELS 1 85 
 
 Italy reddens the sky with the banners of a 
 land revived. . . . 
 
 " Such is the construction of my story, how- 
 ever, that to entirely deny the Philosopher 
 the privilege he stipulated for when with 
 his assistance I conceived it, would render 
 our performance unintelligible to that acute 
 and honourable minority which consents to 
 be thwacked with aphorisms and sentences 
 and a fantastic delivery of the verities. 
 While my play goes on, I must permit him 
 to come forward occasionally. We are 
 indeed in a sort of partnership, and it is 
 useless for me to tell him that he is not 
 popular and destroys my chance." 
 
 After all, it is but an acute and honour- 
 able minority that reads and appreciates 
 Shakespeare, and a true thinker can only 
 hope to reach a minority within that 
 minority among his contemporaries. 
 
 In Beauchamf s Career, too, we find this 
 recognition of the fact that the author's 
 manner is not the popular manner {^see quota-
 
 1 86 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 tion on pp. 131, 132) ; again, in Lord O^^mont 
 and His Aminta^ after a passage consider- 
 ing the heroine psychologically, the author 
 confesses that there is little pleasure to be 
 found "on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator 
 sensible to the pulse of his audience." And 
 yet once more, in one of the earliest stories, 
 Evan Harrington, we had recognition of 
 what may be termed the Meredithian 
 method, "Action! action! — he sighed for 
 it as I have done since I came to know that 
 this history must be morally developed." 
 
 We feel of Mr Meredith that he, like his 
 own Gower Woodseer — in whom we seem 
 to read somethinof of the author's own 
 character — has "the Cymric and Celtic 
 respect of character which puts aside the 
 person's environment to feel the soul ; " and 
 here, too, we may note his admiration for 
 the Welsh character which comes out again 
 and again in the studies of life to which 
 these chapters may, it is sincerely hoped, 
 turn a few readers. It is better to read true
 
 THE LATER NOVELS 187 
 
 books than such biblia a biblia as this, which 
 is but an attempt at an introduction, a kind 
 of newly-planted finger-post on a literary 
 highway — uninteresting and unpicturesque 
 in itself, but pointing with digital emphasis 
 to a place of inexhaustible treasure. 
 
 What Hazlitt said of a much smaller man 
 may with far greater force be applied to 
 Mr Meredith — " He employs the arts of 
 fiction ; not to adorn the deformed, or dis- 
 guise the false, but to make truth shine 
 out the clearer, and beauty look more 
 beautiful."
 
 V 
 
 LIST OF WORKS 
 
 The Bibliography of Mr Meredith's writ- 
 ings which has been admirably prepared 
 by Mr John Lane is bound up with 
 Mr Le Gallienne's tribute to the poet. 
 Some day it may be hoped that Mr Lane 
 will see fit to issue that Bibliography by 
 itself. Here I simply give a chronological 
 list of Mr Meredith's books. 
 
 185 1. Poems. 
 
 1856. The Shaving of Shagpat. 
 
 1857. Fari7ia. 
 
 1859. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 
 
 1 86 1. Evan Harrington. 
 
 1862. Modern Love, and Other Poems. 
 
 1864. Emilia in England (renamed Sandra Belloni). 
 
 1865. Rhoda Fleming. 
 1867. Vittoria.
 
 LI€T OF WORKS i8g 
 
 V- 187 1. The Adventures of Harry Richmond. 
 1876. Beauchamfs Career. 
 /1879. The Egoist. 
 , 1 88 1. The Tragic Comedians. 
 1883. Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. 
 1885. Diana of the Crosstvays. 
 
 1887. Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. 
 
 1888. A Reading of Earth. 
 
 ,^ 1 89 1. One of Our Conquerors. 
 
 1892. The Empty Purse, and Other Poems. 
 
 1894. The Tale of Chloe, and Other Stories. {The 
 
 Tale of Chloe ; The House on the Beach; 
 Farina ; The Case of General Ople and 
 Lady Camper.) 
 Lord Ormont and His A7ninta. 
 
 1895. The Amazing Marriage. 
 
 1897. An Essay on Comedy. 
 Selected Poefns. 
 
 1898. Odes in Contribution to the Song of French 
 
 History. 
 Poems (collected in two volumes). 
 1 90 1. A Reading of Life, with Other Poems. 
 
 Many of these works have been issued in 
 several forms. All of the novels, up to and 
 including One of Our Conquerors, with the 
 single exception of The Tragic Co7nedians, 
 were issued in dark blue cloth covers, and
 
 igo GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 that, I think, thanks to associations, remains 
 the favourite edition with most of Mr Mere- 
 dith's earHer readers. Then Messrs Constable 
 issued a complete uniform library edition 
 in thirty-two volumes, carefully revised 
 by the author, and later a popular six- 
 shilling edition in red cloth, marked with the 
 author's monogram. This year the last- 
 named firm has issued the novels and stories 
 in a set of fifteen delightful "pocket" 
 volumes, printed on very thin paper, but in 
 the same type as that employed in the six- 
 shilling edition, bound in red ribbed cloth, 
 and with the author's autograph in gold on 
 the cover.
 
 " Full lasting is the song, though he, 
 The singer, passes." 
 
 The Thrush in February.
 
 INDEX 
 
 " Adventures of Harry 
 
 Richmond, The," 17, 119, 
 
 126, 170, 171 
 ''Amazing Marriage, The," 
 
 31, 170 et seq. 
 "Aneurin's Harp," 55 
 " Appeasement of Demeter, 
 
 The," 69 
 '' Ask is Love Divine," ^^ 
 
 " Ballad of Fair Ladies in 
 Revolt, The," 71, 76 
 
 " Ballads and Poems of 
 Tragic Life," 29, 55, 76 
 
 " Beauchamp's Career," 17, 
 124 ei seq., 185 
 
 Bibliography, 188 
 
 Box Hill, Mr Meredith at, 21, 
 
 34 
 Browning, Robert, 45 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 129 
 "Case of General Ople and 
 Lady Camper, The," 133, 
 170 
 Chambers's Journal, 5, 42 
 Chelsea, Mr Meredith at, 13 
 " Chillianwallah," 5, 42 
 Comedy, Mr Meredith lec- 
 tures on, 18, 137 
 Copsham Cottage (j'^^ Esher) 
 Cor nhill Magazine, 17, 119 
 Courtney, Mr W. L., 130 
 
 N I 
 
 " Diana of the Crossways," 
 
 22, III, 140, 152 ef seq. 
 Dickens, Charles, 92 
 Du Maurier, George, 17 
 
 " Earth's Secret, 70 
 
 " Egoist, The," 19, 21, 41, 81, 
 
 107, III, 140 t'/ seij. 
 Eliot, George, 57, 92, 136 
 " Emilia in England " (see 
 
 " Sandra Belloni ") 
 " Empty Purse and Other 
 
 Poems, The," 31 
 Esher, Mr Meredith at, 9 
 ''Evan Harrington," 9, loi 
 
 ei seq., 125, 170, 186 
 
 " Faith on Trial, A," 58 
 " Farina," 9, 18, 90 el seq. 
 Fiction, Mr Meredith on, 26 
 Flint Cottage (see Box Hill) 
 Fortnightly Review, 16, 17 
 
 Garnett, Dr Richard, 91 
 " Grandfather Bridgman," 12 
 Guiney, Miss Louise Imogen, 
 quoted, 176 
 
 HarDiMAN, Sir William, 6 ; 
 
 quoted, 10, 16 
 " Hard Weather," 65 
 Hardy, Mr Thomas, 136 
 Hazlitt, William, quoted, 187 
 
 93
 
 194 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Henley, Mr W. E., 19; quoted, 
 
 57, 11. 139 
 Home Rule, Mr Meredith 
 
 and, 23 
 " House on the Beach, The," 
 
 18, 133 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, quoted, 53 
 
 Journalism, Mr Meredith 
 
 in, 8 
 " Joy is Fleet," n 
 "Juggling Jerry," 61 
 
 Knight, Mr Joseph, quoted, 
 13 
 
 Lane, Mr John, 188 
 " Lark Ascending, The," 61 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 150 
 Le Gallienne, Mr Richard, 
 
 104 
 Leonard, Mr R. Maynard, on 
 " Politics in George Mere- 
 dith's Novels," 125 
 London Institution, Mr 
 Meredith lectures at, 18, 
 137 
 " Lord Ormont and his 
 Aminta,"3i, it6 ci seq., 186 
 " Love in the Valley," 71 
 " Love is Winged," 77 
 " Lucifer in Starlight," 78 
 Lynch, Miss Hannah, 178 
 
 " Marian," 78 
 
 Mazzini, no 
 
 McCarthy, Mr Justin, quoted, 
 
 24, 37,47 
 " Melampus," 67 
 Meredith, George, biography, 
 
 4 et seq. ; letters from, 7, 
 
 20, 25, 30, 34 ; seventieth 
 
 birthday of, 31, 32 
 
 "Modern Love," 12, 14, 46 
 
 et seq. 
 Moliere,the great comic poet, 
 
 138 
 
 New Quarterly Magazine, 
 
 18, 133, 134 
 " Night Walk, The," 80 
 Norton, The Hon. Mrs, 23, 
 
 153-154 
 Novels, Mr Meredith's {see 
 
 also under titles), 81 etseq. 
 "Nuptials of Attila," 76 
 
 O'Brien, Mr Barry, 23 
 " Odes in Contribution to the 
 Song of French History," 
 
 34, 79 
 " Old Chartist, An," 70, 7^^ 
 Oilier, Charles, 7 
 " Once a Week," 12 
 " One of Our Concjuerors," 
 
 158, 160 et seq. 
 " On the Idea of Comedy and 
 
 of the Uses of the Comic 
 
 Spirit," 18, 137 
 "Orchard and the Heath, 
 
 The," 77 
 " Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 
 
 The," 9,92 et seq., 125, 130, 
 
 144, 170 
 
 Pall Mall Magazine, The, 3 1 
 Parnell Commission, Mr 
 
 Meredith at, 24 
 Peacock, Ellen (Mrs Mere- 
 dith), 7 
 Peacock, T. L., 7 
 "Poems," 185 1, 6,42 
 " Poems," collected, 34, 44 
 " Poems and Lyrics of the 
 
 Joy of Earth," 22 
 Poetry, Mr Meredith's {see 
 also under titles), 40 et seq.
 
 INDEX 
 
 195 
 
 "Question Whither, The/' 
 57 
 
 " Reading of Earth, A," 29, 
 
 58,68 
 " Reading of Life and Other 
 
 Poems, A," 34, 79 
 ReaHsm, Mr Meredith's, 131, 
 
 145 
 " Reflector, The," 29 
 "Rhoda Fleming," 16, 113 et 
 
 seq., 126, 147, 158 
 Rossetti, D. G., 13, 53 
 Rossetti, Mr Wilham, 13 
 
 "Sandra Belloni," 15, 106 
 
 etseg.i 125, 181 
 Sharp, Mr Wilham, quoted, 
 
 53 
 " Shaving of Shagpat, The," 
 
 9, 16, 83 et seq. 
 Shelley's " To a Skylark," 64 
 Society of Authors, Mr Mere- 
 dith as President, 31 
 " Song in the Songless," 80 
 Sonnets, 78 
 
 Stephen, James Kenneth, 29 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 
 
 quoted, 148 
 Street, Mr G. S., quoted, 81 
 Style, Mr Meredith on, 26 
 
 Swinburne, Mr A. C, 13, 47, 
 181 ; quoted, 14, 52 
 
 "Tale of Chloe, The," 18, 
 
 134 
 Tennyson's "Throstle Song,'' 
 
 62 
 Thackeray, W. M., 92 ; 
 
 quoted, i 
 Thomson, James (B.V.), 19 ; 
 
 quoted, 21, 47, 99, 178 
 "Three Singers to Young 
 
 Blood," 71, ^'j 
 " Thrush in February, The," 
 
 22, 70 
 " Tragic Comedians, The," 
 
 22, III, 150 et seq. 
 " Twilight of the Gods, The," 
 
 91 
 
 " Vital Choice, The," 80 
 " Vittoria," 16, 106 et seq., 
 119, 170 
 
 Westminster Gazette, quoted, 
 
 35 
 Weybridge, Mr Meredith at, 
 
 7 
 White Friars Club, 34 
 Whitman, Walt, 66 
 " Woods of Westermain, 
 
 The," 42 
 
 THE END
 
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 G. RANGER-GULL'S NEW NOVEL 
 
 Messrs GREENING & CO. beg to announce that 
 they have published the third edition of a new 
 historical novel by Mr C. Ranger-Gull (Author of 
 "The Hypocrite," "Back to Lilac Land," "Miss 
 Malevolent," etc.) entitled "The Serf." Orders should 
 be placed with libraries and bookstalls at once. 
 
 THE SERF 
 
 H XTale of tbe Uimcs ot Iking Stephen 
 
 BY 
 
 C. RANGER=QULL 
 
 Author of 
 "The Hypocrite," "Back to Lilac Land," etc. 
 
 Six Shillings I M t wtrir Six Shillings 
 
 The action of the story takes place in the early medieeval ages, the actual 
 date being about 1136, that period of anarchy and wickedness which has had no 
 parallel in English history. 
 
 In Mr Ranger-Gull's story the facts of that lawless and evil time — a time in 
 which the monkish historian wrote, " Christ and all His a7tgels seemed asleep " 
 — have been faithfully recorded. 
 
 The method of the popular historian, too mealy-mouthed or too ignorant 
 to speak the truth, has not been used here. After long research and a thorough 
 study of contemporary documents, the author has painted a complete picture, 
 lacking no essential detail, of these times of blood and steel. 
 
 Vet "The Serf" is a story which cannot be called a gloomy one, though a 
 tragedy of free-will warring against fate is its principal inoti/. 
 
 The character of Hyla the Serf may be said to be a study in natural nobility 
 of mind. In the adventures of this man, his daring, his cunning, his great dash 
 for liberty, the reader will trace the growth of that great political idea which 
 has gained Englishmen their freedom. 
 
 From the first page to the last the action of the story rushes on with an 
 impetuosity and force which will carry the reader with it to the last words. 
 How the poor serfs rose in their misery and avenged themselves upon their 
 tyrant, how they fled through the great Hilgay fen, and how the final tragedy 
 was enacted on the top of the Outfangthef tower at sunset, will interest every 
 reader, old and young alike. 
 
 And though, first and foremost, "The Serf" is a story of " e.\citement," 
 of vivid incident and the clash of arms, yet the publishers doubt if a more 
 accurate picture of life in the early middle ages has been published for very 
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 GREENING & CO., LTD., 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road
 
 THE SERF 
 
 By C. RANGER.GULL 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 50ME PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 Sketch. — "A brilliantly wiilten story." 
 
 Daily Express. — "To dive deep into the chronicles of serfdom 
 and tell plainly the story of a long-forgotten deed of noble daring 
 is good work, and thanks are due to Mr C. Ranger-Gull for his 
 story 'The Serf.' . . . The story is wonderfully interesting, and 
 appeals irresistibly to the British temperament," 
 
 Sunday Sun. — " A thrillingly entertaining story, told with 
 much spirit and literary skill." 
 
 Saturday Review. — "Full as it be of grim realism and 
 ghastly tragedy, it is impossible not to read this book to the bitter 
 end — bitter enough, in all conscience. . . . The book is without 
 doubt a notable one. It is written in the true spirit of the times 
 which it so eloquently describes." 
 
 Pilot. — "The story of Hyla the Serf is a very arresting one, 
 and the study of the time shows both knowledge and insight. The 
 blending of squalor and magnificence in its daily life, of lawless 
 strife and childlike faith in its men and women, is admirably 
 rendered." 
 
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 in the reign of King Stephen. . . . We feel sure ' The Serf ' will 
 be greeted with pleasure by all lovers of history and romance." 
 
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 Stephen's reign, and shows with relentless realism the cruelties of 
 the Barons and those in their pay towards the humble and long- 
 suffering serfs. . . . The style is at all times vigorous, and the 
 author does some excellent descriptive work."
 
 THE SERF 
 
 By C. RANGER.GULL 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 MORE PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 Rock. — " A brilliant piece of romance work." 
 
 Mr A. T. QuiLLER-CoucH in the Daily News. — "A novel of 
 uncommon merit ; an historical novel of a period rarely attempted 
 by fiction." 
 
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 original thought, and an able pen. His style is clear and forcible, 
 and some of the passages in this, his latest story, are full of pathos." 
 
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 praise, and willingly do we accord it. . . . The story he has pro- 
 vided, with so carefully studied environment, is one that is strong 
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 Norman days struck a blow of vengeance and for freedom. He 
 pierced his lord with three arrows, one for each ravished daughter, 
 and one for freedom, and after thrilling adventures expiates his 
 crime by a death of the most frightful torture. There are so many 
 powerful dramatic scenes in the story that I should think the adver- 
 tised version of it for the stage would be most effective. " 
 
 Vanity Fair. — "The story has very great merit, interest, and 
 no inconsiderable artistic quality. The author can paint the 
 atmosphere of the time with much strength and vivid realisation."' 
 
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 stirring episodes carry the reader breathlessly along." 
 
 Second notice in Outlook. — "The age is well suggested in 
 its marring elements of sordidness and splendour, fierce cruelty and 
 childlike faith ; and the characterisation is strong in many types : 
 brutal lord, drunken priest, and chivalrous jongleur. The author 
 achieves a convincing study of twelfth century England, in the 
 mastery of its strongholds, the misery of its serfs' hovels, and the 
 sanctuary of Holy Church."
 
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 on them are worth quoting " (extract follows). 
 
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 from the celebrated Painting by J. Mordecai. Third Edition. 
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 ifome Tlotadie yfamfeU of the Present Time 
 (Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree, 
 Wilson Barrett and Forbes Robertson.) By Clement 
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 and an appreciation of Mr Clement Scott by L. Arthur 
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 Pilot. — " This book will be eagerly read by all who, not having had an opportunity of 
 seeing this or that actor in the character, is anxious to know ' how it was done.' " 
 Court Circular. — " interesting and valuable. Indeed it would be difficult to name 
 any better theatrical criticism. The style is nervous and vivid, and the critical acumen 
 displayed of a high order. . . . The criticisms are a valuable contribution to dramatic 
 literature, and will be read with great interest by all playgoers." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — "The dramatic critic's vivid impressions and subtle analysis 
 enable us to compare the varied interpretations which dramatic genius have put upon 
 Shakespeare's great creation. They will make interesting reading for the student as well 
 as the playgoer, for Mr Scott does not fail to note deviations from this or that text, and 
 departures from traditional ' points ' and hackneyed effects." 
 
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 appertain to works of travel." 
 
 Daily Express. — " A delightful and intimate work." 
 
 Sunday Special. — " There is an intense enthusiasm, a poetic fervour, and a dry sense 
 
 of liumour, such as you only find at intervals among books." 
 
 Outlook. — "These records of Reiselust, or go-fever, as we may call them, are off the 
 
 beaten track, are novel, manly and picturesque." 
 
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 and the eventful incidents of his career. Altogether it is a fascinating biography of an 
 
 interesting person." 
 
 Weekly Despatch. — "A truly fascinating volume which should be read by everyone." 
 
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 Review of the Week. — "It is a very remarkable book, and the ideas set forth in it 
 
 are startlingly original, . . . The man who is not moved to think deeply after reading 
 
 this book must indeed be ' dead to the soul.' In a style that is beautiful in its simplicity, 
 
 Clelia works out his conclusions with marvellous skill." 
 
 Westminster Review. — "Contains much sound criticism of a new and daring 
 
 kind. . . . The book should be read by all Shakspearean students." 
 
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 ^Od in hfha^6peare. An Evolution of the Ideal in 
 
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 J^ TSooA of the ^O^ter. By. W. S. Rogers. 
 
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 to his knowledge and a monument to his taste. This very handsome volume ... is 
 
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 Jlorthern ^i'ffAt6 and y^hadou)6. stories of 
 
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 from the Marquis of Lome reproduced in fac-simile. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
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 ness and genuine excellence. Mr Taber has undoubtedly struck what is a virgin soil so 
 far as fiction is concerned. The local colour of the story is novel — so novel, in fact, as 
 to give quite an unusual interest and value to the book." 
 
 Umpire (Book of the Week j.—" Mr Taber has the gift of story-telling, and he has the 
 peculiar satisfaction of being first in an entirely new field. There is undoubted 
 fascination in his pages." 
 
 Outlook. — " Well written and decidedly entertaining. It is to be hoped that Mr Taber 
 may produce another series of characteristic stories, as direct in their appeal to the 
 sympathy as are these." 
 
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 and feeling into his work." 
 
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 Oman : a study and Defence. Adapted from the 
 French of Alfred Fouill^e by the Rev. T. A. Seed. Crown 
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 Sunday Special. — " There ismuch curious information in this little book, first as to 
 
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 with commendable conciseness." 
 
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 y^ome yfome 7rutA6 re ^e 9llaori TSfar, 
 
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 J^ Ti'ip to J^aradoxia, and other Humours of the 
 
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 of the Period," " Social Transformation of the Victorian Age," 
 
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 in Mr Escott's satirical pictures of the modern world. . . . Those who know the inner 
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 . . . There is a great deal of very clever sword-play in Mr Escott's description of 
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 73j^€ " 76fai/6 of ^n'me. with some Stories from 
 the Black Museum. By R. J. Power-Berrey. Profusely 
 Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
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 and shudder as they come." 
 
 Sheffield ludependeut. — " We do not remember to have ever seen a more popularly, 
 written summary of the methods of thieves than this bright and chatty volume. It is 
 the work of a writer who evidently has a most intimate knowledge of the criminal 
 classes, and who can carry on a plain narrative briskly and forcibly. The book fascinates 
 by its freshness and unusualness." 
 
 Liverpool Review- — "This is no fanciful production, but a clear, dispassionate re- 
 velation of the dodges of the professional criminal. Illustrated by numerous pen and ink 
 sketches, Mr Power-Berrey's excellent work is useful as well as interesting, for it will 
 certainly not assist the common pilferer to have all his little tricks made public property 
 in this lucid and easily-rememberable style." 
 
 ^/ie S^rt of '^foeution and Public Speaking. By 
 Ross Ferguson, With an Introduction by Geo. Alexander. 
 Dedicated by permission to Miss Ellen Terry. Second Edition. 
 Crown 8vo, strongly bound in cloth, is. 
 
 Australian Mail. — "A useful little book. We can strongly recommend it to the 
 
 chairmen of public companies." 
 
 Stage.— "A carefully-composed treatise, obviously written by one as having authority. 
 
 Students will find it of great service." 
 
 Literary World. — " The essentials of elocution are dealt with in a thoroughly capable 
 
 and practical way. The chapter on public speaking is particularly satisfactory." 
 
 ^/^€ I^atA of the kfouf. Being Essays on Conti- 
 nental Art and Literature. By S. C. de SoissoNS, Author of 
 "A Parisian in America," etc. Illustrated with portraits, etc. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, los. 6d. (in preparation). 
 
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 ^rOm t/ie 73oO^ JSeautifuf. Being some Old 
 Lights Re-lit. By the Author of "The Hypocrite" and "Miss 
 Malevolent." Cloth gilt, gilt edges, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Lloyd's. — " Full of reverence, yet glows with vivid imagination. . . . These are Bible 
 Stones in a most novel and attractive form, never irreverent, but full of the keenest 
 interest." 
 
 British W^^^y-r"" Among the many attempts which have recently been made to fill 
 out the Bible stories with the realistic touches suggested by our increased knowledge 
 of the conditions of life in ancient times, this anonymous volume will take a high 
 place. Seven stories are retold, some from the Old, some from the New Testament. 
 To certain tastes they may seem too elaborately wrought, the author evidently relishes 
 what is gorgeous, and his descriptions of Potiphar's house are very richly inlaid with 
 ornament, but whatever be the judgment of readers in this respect, there can be no 
 question as to the effective realism of the narratives. Certainly some of the stories will 
 convey both to children and adults fresh and memorable conceptions of Biblical scenes." 
 
 MARIE CORELLI 
 ^atriotkm or ^eff" ^dCertkemenf ? 
 
 A Social Note on the Transvaal War, 1S99-1900. By Marie 
 Corelli. Sixth Edition. 410, sewed. 2d. 
 
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 ' The Merchant of Susa. A Drama in Three Acts. 
 By A. J. Ferreira. Small 8vo, hand-made paper, art cloth, 
 gilt, 2s. 6d. nett. 
 
 Daily Mail (Glasgow). — " The story unfolded is very interesting and full of exciting 
 
 incidents." 
 
 Aberdeen Free Press. — " A highly readable piece of work, and it would, we feel 
 
 sure, if suitably mounted and in the hands of capable actors, prove eminently effective 
 
 on the stage. The action is rapid, there are no diffuse vapourings, and there is ample 
 
 scope for attractive scenic effect." 
 
 Independent (Sheffield). — " The Assyrian setting makes a novel background, and there 
 
 is movement and some striking situations in the play." 
 
 t^deaf J^/il/6iea{ ^Ufture, And the Truth about 
 the Strong Man. By Apollo (the Scottish Hercules and Sandow's 
 Challenger). Fourth Edition. Profusely illustrated, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 To-day. — " It is a very sensible book, and Apollo knows what he is talking about." 
 County Gentleman. — " Will prove useful to aspiring young athletes." 
 Westminster Gazette.— " Those who take an interest in Physical Culture will find 
 the manual instructive and useful." 
 
 Football Echo. — " ' Ideal Physical Culture ' scatters to the wind much of the nonsense 
 and bunkum written ad nauseam about the strong man, his biceps, his triceps, the 
 muscular fat, and his stupendous feats." 
 
 ^he Sfear 73oo^ of t^e ^fa^e. Being an 
 
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 Play recorded. Compiled by L. Arthur Greening. About 
 260 pages, strongly bound in cloth, 3s. 6d, 
 
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 ^ 3fi6torj/ of flur^erjf 7iAj/m€6. By Percy 
 
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 cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Morning Post. — " Contains a great deal of pleasing information concerning the origin of 
 
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 nnanner which is both entertaining and intelligible." 
 
 World. — "Will be found entertaining by everybody." 
 
 Spectator. — " The reader will find much curious matter in Mr Green's volume." 
 
 Examiner (Cork). — "A comprehensive and thoroughly interesting book." 
 
 Madame. — " A most interesting book. . . . To those mothers who have their children 
 
 round them in the story-telling twilight this book of Mr Green's should be a treasiuy of 
 
 delight." 
 
 Sn 2uamt '€a4f S^ngfia. Descriptive Sketches. 
 By T. West Carnie. Illustrated by W. S. Rogers. Long 
 l2mo, cloth, IS. 
 
 Observer. — " That East Anglia exercises a very potent spell over those who once come 
 under its influence is proved by the case of George Borrow, and all who share in the 
 fascination will delight in this brightly written, companionable little volume." 
 Graphic. — " it is a prettily got up and readable little book." 
 
 Saturday Review. — "Will be welcomed by all who have come under the charm of 
 East Anglia." 
 
 J^ 9llan Adrift. Being Leaves from a Nomad's 
 Portfolio. By Bart Kennedy, Author of "Darab's Wine-Cup," 
 " The Wandering Romanoff," etc. This very entertaining book 
 is a narrative of adventures in all parts of the world. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, 6s. 
 
 Mr Andrew Lang, in the course of a long and laudatory notice in Longman's 
 Magazine, said : — " It is a strange photograph of rude and violent life. The narrator 
 always carries his life in his fist. He describes, better than any other writer, the existence 
 of a tramp, and gives an amazing account of the brutality, and even torture, practised on 
 workers in some parts of the United States. . . . The book is as simple in style as 
 Swift's writing ; a kind of labouring Trelawny might have fathered these adventures of 
 a younger son." 
 
 Mr Richard Le Gallienne (in the Idler). — "'A Man Adrift' has held me as few 
 recent books have power to do. The book is ' real ' because it has first been really lived, 
 and then been really written. Mr Kennedy's book has held me, not only by its reality, 
 but by its courage, its pity, its humoiu:, its all-embracing humanity, its quiet fierceness. 
 ' A Man Adrift ' is a brave book." 
 
 Morning Leader.— " The record of an adventurous life, when well told, always appeals 
 to the imagination and sympathy of the reader, and 'A Man Adrift' is such a record. 
 Presumably the adventures are real ; they have all the vividness of reality at all events, 
 and one follows the hardships and wanderings of the narrator with keen interest. . . . 
 Mr Kennedy is to be congratulated on his ' Man Adrift.'" 
 
 County Gentleman. — "This is the book of a strong man. It has vigour, originality 
 and power, and comes as a refreshing change after the maudlin sentimentality of most 
 modern stories. . . . Mr Kennedy has a characteristic style. He writes in short, crisp 
 sentences that are at once direct and fearless. It is mainly his own story that he tells in 
 this strangely fascinating volume. " 
 
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 iSfoinan and t/te iXfl'td. Epigrams on Woman, Love, 
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 etc. New and revised edition. Small 8vo, art vellum, gilt extra, 
 gilt edges, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Great TbOUghtS. — "The most beautiful book on my table is ' Woman and the Wits." 
 
 ... In this lovely volume of about 200 pages some of the wisest, wittiest, tenderest 
 
 epigrams on woman and on cognate topics to be found in ancient and modern times, have 
 
 been brought together with taste and judgment." 
 
 LadidB* Pictorial. — "The compiler of this dainty little volume has produced a veritable 
 
 lucky bag for the dipper who is anxious to find something smart and clever.' 
 
 Madame. — " A book that should find favour on every woman's table." 
 
 Literary World. — " The epigrams are well selected, and should form a perfect armoury 
 
 for any young bachelor put up to propose the toast of ' The Ladies.' . . . There is good 
 
 variety too." 
 
 S)re44 in a ^uU/ied By "R." a Booklet every 
 woman who wishes to dress tastefully should certainly possess. 
 Crown i6mo, cloth, is. ; sewed, 6d. 
 
 'W€€d6 and ^{0lC€r6. Poems by William Luther 
 
 LONGSTAFF, Author of "The Tragedy of the Lady Palmist." 
 Crown Svo, art cloth, gilt extra, gilt top, 2s. 6d. nett. 
 
 Sun. — "Mr Longstaff has real fire and passion in all of his work. He has a graceful 
 touch and a tuneful ear. There is exquisite melody in his metre." 
 
 Times, — " He has passion and energy enough to stock half a dozen average minor 
 poets. . . . But he has in him something of the stuff of which poetry — as opposed to 
 verse — is made." 
 
 Court Circular.—" Unquestionably a poet of a very high order — musical, suggestive, 
 imaginative and picturesque. ' In the Times to come ' is a beautiful poem, full of 
 suggestion, with a subtle melody of its own. How well Mr Longstaff can write is seen 
 in ' A Hopeless Dawn." It is the work of a true poet. Mr Longstaff 's poems deserve 
 more extended notice. There is art in his work, and music; and his verse is full of 
 promise. Mr Longstaflf's muse is frank and sincere, and many of his readers will forgive 
 her for not posing as a prude.'' 
 
 13af{ad6 of ^^04ffy hfhire^. By george 
 
 Bartram, Author of "The People of Clopton," "The White- 
 headed Boy," etc. Dedication accepted by Theodore Watts- 
 Dunton. Small Svo, cloth, 2s. 6d. nett. 
 
 Speaker. — "We hail with the greatest pleasure Mr George Bartram's 'Ballads of 
 Ghostly Shires.' " 
 
 Academy. — " His descriptive passages have the true poetic touch, and a fresh grace 
 about them. He is, in truth, well worth reading, and has the distinction of writing 
 narrative verse well in a lyric age. It is a breezy, picturesque, taking little book." 
 Atbeoseum. — ' Mr Bartram has the gift of description, and his vigorous narrative verse 
 moves swiftly." 
 
 Sunday Sun.—" Remarkable and beautiful poems. Enjoyable reading." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C. 
 
 6
 
 10 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 TfiYfa^e ^ife and Weefiriff. songs and verses. 
 
 By Rupert Upperton, the Ploughboy Poet. 2s. 6d. nett. 
 Scotsman. — "This is a pleasant and an in teresting_ volume of healthy English 
 verse. . . . The book deserves to be read, and will interest any curious lover of 
 poetry." 
 
 North Star. — "Amusing and instructive poems illustrative of village life. Those who 
 are on the lookout for new recitations should examine this volume." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — "His humour and satire are genial and well-meaning. He is not 
 without sentiment, and his lyrical pieces will be heartily appreciated." 
 Moimillg Leader. — " There is some good stuff and not a little quaint feeling in the 
 verses of Rupert Upperton." 
 
 St Andrew's. — "Many a simple soul — and there are millionsof such in our land — 
 utterly unable to appreciate the poetry of the critics, will find itself charmed, purified 
 and elevated by the kindly muse of Mr Upperton. Messrs Greening & Co. have done 
 their work well, and enshrined these ' woodnotes wild ' in a beautiful piece of letterpress." 
 
 HER MAJESTY'S EDITION 
 
 Tfip Xfan 'Winnie, together with "THE LEGEND 
 OF SLEEPY HOLLOW." By Washington Irving, and the 
 Complete Literary and Theatrical History of the Story by S. J. 
 Adair Fitz-Gerald, Author of " Fame, the Fiddler." With 
 Portraits of Her Majesty's Theatre Company, and Illustrations by 
 W. G. Mein. Dedicated to Mr H. Beerbohm-Tree. Crown 8vo, 
 art cloth, decorative cover by Will Smart, top edge gilt, 2s. 
 BOOkmaiL — " This edition of Irving's famous legends is in every way to be commended. 
 Type, paper and illustrations are good, and Mr Fitz-Gerald adds to the originals the 
 stage and literary history of ' Rip van Winkle,' which is well worth reading." 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " A pretty and interesting little book." 
 
 Topical Times. — "A really interesting memento, and it costs only 2S. — a perfectly 
 absurd price for a book of this size and quality. Beautifully bound in green cloth, red 
 lettered, it is well printed, and artistically illustrated by Mr Will G. Mein." 
 
 Greening's Masterpiece Library 
 
 "A handsome and artistic series." Vide Press. 
 
 MMinffan ^llhaiJC, a Romance of the Covenanters. By 
 John Galt. Edited, with an Introduction, by Sir George 
 Douglas. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt edges, 3s. 6d. 
 St James's Gazette. — " The splendid panorama it gives of some of the most stirring 
 and far-reaching events in Scottish history, and the skill shown by the author in so 
 arranging his materials that the historic is always subordinated to the human interest, 
 render the book in every way worthy of revival." 
 
 jfa66€W6, A Romance of Abyssinia. By Dr Johnson. 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by JusTiN Hannaford. Illustrated 
 by W. S. Rogers. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt edges, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Morning Leader.—" Well printed and pleasant to handle." 
 
 Globe. — " A very acceptable edition. The text is set forth in large, bold type ; Mr W. 
 
 S. Rogers supplies eight graphic illustrations, while Mr Justin Hannaford furnishes 
 
 an introduction in which the literary history of the story is pleasantly recounted." 
 
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 Qreenins: & Co., Ltd., Publishers ii 
 
 UOtnC^. An Eastern Romance. By William Beckford. 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Justin Hannaford. Illustrated 
 by W. S. Rogers. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt edges, 3s 6d. 
 
 Saturday Review. — " A work of vivid and picturesque imagination, great power, and 
 no small originality. It is saturated with the fragrance and voluptuousness of the East." 
 Outlook.— " In the way of Eastern romances 'Vathek' has always easily stood 
 first. The present edition is handsomely got up, and contains several well-executed 
 illustrations." 
 
 7/l€ "jSfae^ Tufip. A Romance of Old Holland. 
 By Alexandre Dumas. Newly done into English, with Intro- 
 duction, by S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald. Illustrated by John 
 Hassall, Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Sun. — " A delightful edition artistically bound and attractively got up. Mr John 
 Hassall is seen at his best in the illustrations." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — " We recommend it, not only as one of the most interesting, but as 
 without exception, and in every sense of the word, the most readable of Dumas's works." 
 
 Tj/ie Opieurean. a Tale of Mystery and Adventure. 
 
 By Thomas Moore. Edited, with an Introduction, by Justin 
 Hannaford. Illustrated by Will Smart. 8vo, cloth, gilt 
 edges, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Bookman. — " An interesting, well-produced reprint of Moore's popular Eastern 
 
 romance." 
 
 Great Thoughts. — " It is as bright, and fresh and entertaining as when first it took 
 
 the reading world by storm in 1827." 
 
 Whitehall Review. — " This reprint is welcome, and the manner in which it is printed, 
 
 bound and produced, is a credit to the eminent firm who are responsible for the edition." 
 
 zto/fftnicf / or, The Immortal. A Wonderful Romance 
 of Old Palestine. By Dr Geo. Croly. Edited and revised, with 
 an Introduction, by Rev. T. A. Seed. Illustrated by W. G. Mein. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. (In preparation.) 
 
 J¥4ffl0(/€U6; or, The Devil on Two Sticks. An Illus- 
 trated Edition of the Celebrated Novel by Le Sage, Author of 
 "Gil Bias." Edited by Justin Hannaford. Illustrated by 
 John Hassall. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. (In preparation.) 
 
 ^OWmOQ, A Corsican Romance. By Prosper Merim^e, 
 
 Author of "Carmen." Edited, with an Introduction, by Rev. 
 T. A. Seed. Illustrated by W. S. Rogers. Crown 8vo, cloth 
 gilt, 3s. 6d. (In preparation.) 
 
 Several well-known and popular works by great writers are in 
 active preparation for this artistic series of masterpieces. 
 
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 POPULAR FICTION 
 
 An Obscure Apostle, a Powerful and Dramatic 
 
 Tale, translated from the Polish of Mdme. Orzeszko by Count 
 S. C. de SoissoNS. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Saturday Review.— " An absorbing and delightful story, and we are sure it will be 
 
 read with the greatest pleasure by those who can best appreciate the merits of the finer 
 
 kinds of fiction." 
 
 British Weekly. — "A good story, dramatic, poetic and pathetic." 
 
 Daily Graphic. — "An admirable translation of a fine, intensely human tragedy. One 
 
 reads it from first to last entirely fascinated." 
 
 BOOlnnan. — " A deeply impressive story it is, and if Madame Orzeszko has written 
 
 others equally good, we must hope Count de Soissons will translate them for us." 
 
 St James's Gazette. — "A curious and interesting story, which, apart from its 
 
 power, deserves notice because of the novelty of its material. The jaded appetite, weary 
 
 of English drawing-rooms, Californian mines, and Indian flirtations, will here find an 
 
 absolutely fresh entourage to a very remarkable story. ... It is pictorial, poetic and 
 
 dramatic." 
 
 The Modern Argonauts, a Novel. By Eliza 
 
 Orzeszko, Author of "An Obscure Apostle." Translated from 
 the Polish by Count C. S. DE Soissons. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Liverpool Review. — "'The Modem Argonauts' is a remarkable piece of fiction; a 
 work of powerful conception, of original and charming expression, and of noble and 
 exhilaratmg thought." 
 
 Spectator. — "Madame Orzeszko paints in 'The Modern Argonauts' the domestic 
 tragedy of a successful modern millionaire with a boldness and a vigour that remind one 
 of Jokai. The characterisation shows the influence of modern ideas in their most 
 advanced and disintegrating form. ... It is a luridly picturesque problem novel." 
 Daily News. — " The picture which Madame Orzeszko presents, painted on impressionist 
 lines, with suggestions of the symbolistic school, is distinctly striking. . . . Each of the 
 characters in this stirring work is individualised with great skill." 
 Daily Chronicle. — "A powerful story, clever and amusing." 
 
 Dundee Courier. — " The story is powerful ; the English vigorous ; the moral com- 
 mendable." 
 
 Evening Times. — " Its power fascinates us. The originality of the conception, the 
 skill with which the characters are drawn, and the vigovu- and vividness of the writing 
 testily not only to keen insight into human nature, but to Madame Orzeszko's mainten- 
 ance to the eve of threescore years rare and youthful freshness." 
 
 A Girl of the North, a Tale of London and 
 Canada. By Helen Milecete. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, 6s. 
 
 Saturday Review.—" It is piquant and up-to-date. Miss Milecete's style is en- 
 gagingly direct and simple, and she has a natural talent for story-telling." 
 Topical Times. — " A pretty story, charmingly written. . . _. It is pleasant to read, 
 mainly because it is well written, but its glimpses of existence in Canada and West End 
 life do not lack either picturesqueness or humour." 
 
 Outlook.—" There is some clever writing in this novel, and the Canadian chapters are 
 particularly fresh and picturesque." 
 
 An Exile in Bohemia, a powerful and enthralling 
 Novel. By Ernest E. Williams, Author of " Made in Germany," 
 etc. , etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 ao Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 13 
 
 A Detached Pirate, a Novel. By Helen Milecete, 
 
 Author of " A Girl of the North." Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Ladies' Pictorial. — " A clever and audacious book. The story is told in letters, and 
 very clever letters they are . . . Miss Vandeleur is not nerzy, and I prefer her wholesome 
 audacity to the wild wailing of ' The Love Letters of an Englishwoman.' " 
 Court Circular.— "A bright and fascinating book." 
 
 Truth.— "A light and bright modern story of a divorcee with herself as co-respondent. 
 Her habit of masquerading as a man got her into this truly American scrape, and the 
 truly American way in which she got out of it and was re-united to her Othello, is told in 
 the difficult form of letters with a spirit worthy of so whimsical a plot." 
 
 Committed to His Charge, a Canadian Romance. 
 
 By Kate and Robina Lizars. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Athensum. — "This book is decidedly interesting. The authors have a very pleasant 
 
 gift of gaiety and an agreeable way of expressing themselves." 
 
 Daily News. — '' Both interesting and amusing." 
 
 Record. — " Very clever and humorous." 
 
 Daily Graphic — " A clever and entertaining novel." 
 
 Christian World. — "The incidents connected with the four years' rectorship of Tom 
 
 Huntley are cleverly arranged and as cleverly told. . . . We have nothing but praise 
 
 for this book, which is strongly suggestive of George Eliot's ' Scenes from Clerical Life.' " 
 
 His Grace's Grace, a Powerful Novel. By the 
 Author of "The Hypocrite," "Miss Malevolent," etc. Crown 
 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Where the Oranges Grow, a Humorous Novel. 
 
 By N. A. Leyken (the Russian Mark Twain). Translated from 
 the original by Count C. S. DE SOISSONS. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 The Tragedy of a Pedigree. An interesting 
 
 Story. By Hugo Ames. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Sketch.—" Such easy epigrammatic talk as is to be found In this book is not often met 
 
 with. It is witty and delightful, and the characters seem to be drawn from life with a 
 
 master-pen." 
 
 Scotsman. — "An excellent story, well written and easily read." 
 
 Sunday Special. — '' Can be recommended as a bright, terse, epigrammatic novel of 
 
 to-day. There are so few writers who are capable of constructing a neat and telling 
 
 epigram that the present volume is doubly welcome." 
 
 Vanity Fair. — " This novel is entertaining, suggestive, gently cynical and quick with 
 
 promise." 
 
 Madame. — " it is a crisp delineation of modern social life, abounding in excellent 
 
 characterisation, sparkling dialogue and epigrams that are new and smart. There is 
 
 scarcely a page of the book that does not contam a sentence worth reading a second time 
 
 and then marking with pencil for another perusal." 
 
 Red Fate, a Powerful Novel. By Edmund Forbes. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 Daily Despatch. — " in ' Red Fate' we have a daring book. Messrs Greening have in 
 Mr Forbes the writer of a strong book that will cause some talk." 
 
 The Sotsman. — " The story possesses the merits of freshness, originality and ingenuity. 
 It is written in an animated and picturesque style, and is full of life and incident." 
 Onlooker.—" Mr Edmund Forbes has drawn a striking study, and his style and languaM 
 are always most scholarly. Grellier is a real and living character. It is a book that could 
 only have been written by one endowed with the imagination and musical pen that betray 
 the poet." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 14 Greenins: & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 The Prettiness of Fools, a Realistic and 
 
 Powerful Novel. By Edgar Hewitt. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Literary World. — "Very entertaining reading." 
 
 Dundee Advertiser.—" A singularly strong story." 
 
 Moming Post. — " An ambitious book, ambitious in its style and in the bold way it 
 
 affects to tackle matters which are generally reserved for private conversation. At the 
 
 same time it were ungracious to deny that Mr Edgar Hewitt has written a very clever 
 
 book, full of keen observation, and not unseasoned with humour." 
 
 Gentlewoman. — " A powerful and interesting book, with the interest kept up till the 
 
 end . . . altogether a very amusing and clever book." 
 
 The Magnetism of Sin. a Tale Founded on 
 
 Fact. By ".^Escclapius." Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 Midland Mail. — " An interesting story. . . . Exceedingly well written," 
 Daily DespatCb. — " ' The Magnetism of Sin ' is a story as choke full of mystery as any 
 tale could be. . . . The author of the book — who is obviously a very daring young man 
 — has written a story which is as remarkable in its way as ' The Mystery of a Hansom 
 Cab." " 
 
 Evening News (Manchester). — " Lovers of the sensational in fiction will find plenty to 
 interest them in ' The Magnetism of Sin." . . . The story is full of romance and dramatic 
 incident, the chapters dealing with the raid on the house by the police, the fight for 
 liberty, the bold escape of the double-dyed traitor, and his subsequent capture and 
 execution in Australia being particularly thrilling." 
 
 The After-Taste. a Novel, By Compton Reade, 
 Author of *' Hard Lines," " Under which King," etc. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, 6s. 
 
 Dr Parker (of the City Temple) says :— " From beginning to end the action of the story 
 is most vivid and most natural. It must certainly win itself many readers." 
 Literary World. — "This novel is decidedly above the average." 
 
 Dally Graphic. — " Amply repays for the reading, for it is written with a keen sense 
 of the fitness of things, and without setting probability at nought — qualities not too 
 frequently found in novels. It is written in a sympathetic style, and keeps the attention 
 centred in the interesting career of the heroine." 
 
 Daughters of Pleasure, a Novel. By Anna, 
 
 COMTESSE DE Bremont. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 Topical Times. — " Brisk and spicy without being blatant and salacious ... a very 
 
 good book, which says a lot of things that wanted saying frankly but delicately. It is, 
 
 at the same time, an engrossing romance." 
 
 Globe. — " Readers will find plenty of cleverness and) ' go,' the Bohemian side of artistic 
 
 life being described with verisimilitude as well as graphic force." 
 
 Books of To-day. — " A story of deep human interest, set forth with undoubted literary 
 
 talent, sense of style, and an ability to handle pure narrative that is rare and welcome. 
 
 A book which can not only be read with interest, but re-read." 
 
 The Seekers of Sentiment, a Series of Powerful 
 Stories. By a "Westminster Schoolboy." Crown 8vo, 
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 The Power of the Past, a Novel. By Daisy 
 Hugh Pryce, Author of "The Pasha," "Goddesses Three," 
 " Valda Hanem," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 15 
 
 A Son of Africa, a Tale of Marvellous Adventures. 
 By Anna, Comtessr de Bremont, Author of " Daughters of 
 Pleasure," " The Gentleman Digger," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 Morning Post- — "Written with unmistakable power." 
 Weekly Times. — " Deserves to be the success of the season." 
 
 World. — "Contains striking incidents erapbically related. We cannot fail to admire 
 the ingenuity displayed by the writer." 
 
 St Jamea'B Gazette. — " A strange and weird story is ' A Son of Africa,' the latest from 
 the pen of Anna, Comtesse de Bremont, author of ' The Gentleman Digger.' From the 
 writer of that story we expect and get vivid word-pictures and local colouring. The 
 descriptions of scenery and incident are wonderfully striking and impressive. , . . Such 
 is the story of ' A Son of Africa' in brief outline. The filling in is sometimes lurid, but 
 always forceful. It is written with power and grip." 
 
 The Gentleman Digger. Realistic Pictures of Life 
 in Johannesburg. By Anna, Comtesse de Bremont, Author of 
 " A Son of Africa," etc. New Edition, revised to date, with a new 
 Preface. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Academy. — " The Comtesse de Brimont presents us with a terribly realistic picture of 
 
 life in Johannesburg diuing the raging of the gold fever." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — "Those who like a good storj-, pleasantly told, should read 'The 
 
 Gentleman Digger.' . . . Readers who turn their attention to this volume will, apart 
 
 from the interesting plot, gain much insight into the manners and customs of a land 
 
 which is only just breaking into civilisation as we understand it." 
 
 Spectator. — "The characters are true to life, and the narration is continuous and 
 
 spirited. The Comtesse de Bremont knows how to describe people and places, and there 
 
 is local coloiu-ing." 
 
 Cynthia's Damages, a story of stage-^^c//. By 
 
 Reginald Turner. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 In The World of Mimes, a story of Theatrical 
 
 Life. By Lewis Melville, Author of " The Life of Thackeray," 
 etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Mora I One Woman's History. An Interesting Novel by 
 T. W. Speight, Author of "The Crime in the Wood," "The 
 Mysteries of Heron Dyke," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 Scotsman. — " One may run through the story of ' Mora ' with considerable enjoyment 
 of the brisk development of an amusing little drama. ... It is clever in contrivance, 
 and lively and entertaining." 
 
 AtlienSSUm. — " The story is pleasing and wholesome. Its general character is that of 
 a comedy with occasional lapses into the realm of drama. ... ' Mora ' is quite like 
 literature, with some amusing scenes, and a general prevalence of good temper." 
 
 Two Days in a Life=time. A Novel. By t. w. 
 
 Speight, Author of "Mora," etc. Crown Svo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 For Himself Alone, a Novel. By T. W. Speight, 
 Author of "The Mystery of Heron Dyke," etc. Crown Svo, 
 cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 1 6 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 Ashes Tell no Tales. A Novel. By Mrs Albert 
 
 S. Bradshaw, Author of "False Gods," "The Gates of Temp- 
 
 tation," "Wife or Slave," etc. Cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 La.dy. — " A strong and dramatic novel." 
 
 Record. — "The story shows great power and the character of Julie is a wonderful 
 
 creation." 
 
 Nortll Sta.r. — "The book is considerably above the average, and bears evidence of 
 
 insight into character and skill in plot construction of no mean order. The story has 
 
 a thrilling interest, and is dramatically told." 
 
 Ira Lorraine, a story of To-day. By CoRALiE Fevez. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 Illustrated London News. — " Full of incident and movement." 
 Weekly Despatch. — "This is a very pretty love story charmingly told. The 
 characters are cleverly drawn. There are, of course, trials, and the lights and shadows of 
 a woman's troubled career, but what love story was ever written without its trials and the 
 inevitable ' all's well ' ? In the case of ' Ira Lorraine ' the end is satisfactory." 
 
 A Comedy of Temptation ; or, The Amateur 
 
 Fiend. A Tale. By Tristram Coutts, Author of "The Pottle 
 
 Papers." Cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Daily News. — " A very bright and breezy little story, wholesome and amusing." 
 Athenaeum. — " May be heartily recommended. A really ingenious story, and provides 
 quite pleasurable excitement, while throughout the book runs a vein of facetious humour 
 which will make it doubly welcome." 
 
 Echo.— "A very sprightly tale, which, despite the extravagance of its leading motive, 
 is full of humour — good humour and human nature." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — '' The author of the unquestionably humorous and conspicuously 
 successful 'Pottle Papers' has given the novel-reading public another 'taste of his 
 quality' in this fantastic story. . . . The element of surprise predominates throughout 
 this eminently entertaining narrative ; unexpectedness is the essential characteristic of 
 all its more salient incidents, comical or tragical ; its dialogue sparkles with genuine, 
 irresistible fun." 
 
 Spectator.—" Mr Tristram Coutts has a genuine gift of huinour, and his account of the 
 chequered courtship of a young London clerk is enlivened with many hilarious touches. 
 The account of the household of Mr Merridew, the irrepressible, if impecunious, optimist 
 ' who named all his numerous progeny after famous commanders and authors, is really 
 delightful." 
 
 The Weird Well. A Tale of To-day. By Mrs 
 
 Alec M'Millan, Author of "The Evolution of Daphne," "So 
 
 Runs my Dream," etc. Art cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Scotsman.— "Carefully constructed and written with skill, which makes it always 
 
 agreeable to read." 
 
 Literary World. — "An interesting, brightly-written story." 
 
 Weekly Times.—" Very powerfully written. Will be read with breathless interest." 
 
 Such is the Law. An interesting Story. By Marie 
 M. Sadleir, Author of "An Uncanny Girl," etc. Cloth, 6s. 
 
 Vanity Fair. — " A very entertaining novel." 
 Sun. — " An undoubtedly clever novel, told in vigorous language." 
 
 St James's Budget. — " So full of incident is ' Such is the Law ' that we are unable to 
 do more than touch the fringe of the plot, and must leave to the reader the task of watch- 
 ing the development of the new romance, which produces an aftermath of happiness for 
 Lavender, and brings a thoroughly interesting story to a satisfactory close." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 17 
 
 And Afterwards? a Powerful Novel. By 
 
 Mrs Harold Gorst, Author of " Possessed of Devils." Crown 
 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 A Virtue of Necessity. A Powerful Tale. By 
 Herbert Adams. Cloth gilt, 6s. 
 
 Sun. — " A powerful, stirring tale of the present day. From start to finish it is interesting, 
 
 especially to lady readers." 
 
 Literary World. — "The writing is good, and many of the remarks are smart and 
 
 pungent while free from any straining after cleverness." 
 
 Record. — " Eminently readable throughout." 
 
 AtheniSUia. — " The dialogue is natural and well rendered." 
 
 The Shadow on the Manse, a story of Religion 
 
 and the Stage. By Campbell Rae-Brown, Author of "Kissing- 
 Cup's Race," etc. Cloth gilt, 3s. 6d, 
 
 Public Opinion. — "An excellent novel in every way." 
 Bookman. — " An interesting story well told." 
 Weekly Sun. — " A touching story and a clever one." 
 
 literature. — " The situations are . . . treated with a satirical bitterness of tone. But 
 many of the scenes are strong in themselves, cleverly arranged, and treated with 
 power and reticence. . . . There are occasional faults, but the tenderness with which 
 Mary Paul's self-sacrifice is recorded, makes us inclined to condone them and to con- 
 gratulate the author." 
 
 A Social Upheaval. An Unconventional Dramatic 
 
 Satirical Tale. By Isidore G. Ascher, Author of "An Odd 
 
 Man's Story," "The Doom of Destiny," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth 
 
 gilt, 6s. 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " The hero is an interesting dreamer, absorbed in his schemes, 
 which are his one weakness. To women, save when they can further the good of his 
 cause, he is obdurate ; in business, strong, energetic and powerful. He is shown to us 
 as the man with a master mind and one absorbing delusion, and as such is a pathetic 
 figure. No one can dispute the prodigality and liveliness of the author's imagination ; 
 his plot teems with striking incidents." 
 
 Vanity Fair. — "The story tells itself very clearly in three hundred pages of very 
 pleasant and entertaining reading. The men and women we meet are not the men and 
 women we really come across in this world. So much the better for us. But we are 
 delighted to read about them, for all that ; and we prophesy success for Mr Ascher's 
 book, particularly as he has taken the precaution of telling us that he is ' only in fun.' " 
 
 A Cry in the Night. An exciting Detective Story. 
 
 By Arnold Golsworthy, Author of " Death and the Woman," 
 
 "Hands in the Darkness," etc. Crown 8vo. cloth, 6s. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "The book is ingenious and cleverly constructed, and there is 
 
 no lack of exciting reading, it is melodramatic, but is relieved by humour characteristic 
 
 of Mr Golsworthy." 
 
 Athenseum. — "A creditably ingenious tale of crime and detection, drawn with spirit 
 
 and humour." 
 
 Morning Post. — "We must give Mr Golsworthy high praise for the way in which he 
 
 plays the game. Old hands as we are at these things, we were for a long time completely 
 
 baflSedby the plot as the most wooden-headed detective of fiction. . . . It is an excellent 
 
 book of its particular kind. Mr Golsworthy has succeeded admirably in the careful, 
 
 clever, amusing character-drawing of an odd group of subsidiary folk. These are very 
 
 human people who stick in the mind after the book is closed." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 1 8 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 A Dead Woman's Vow. a Powerful story. By 
 
 Emile Zola. Translated by Count C. S. DE SoissONS. Crown 
 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Sapho. A new Translation, by G. F. Monkshood, of 
 Daudet's celebrated Romance. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Thais. A new Translation, by E. F. Moody, of the cele- 
 brated Romance of Old Egypt by the great French novelist, 
 Anatole France. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Shams I a Social Satire. By ? This is a remark- 
 able and interesting story of Modern Life in London Society. It 
 is a powerful work, written with striking vividness. The plot is 
 fascinating, the incidents exciting, and the dialogue epigrammatic 
 and brilliant. " Shams " is written by one of the most popular 
 novelists of the day. Sixth Edition. Crown Svo, art cloth, gilt, 
 3s. 6d. 
 Public Opinion. — "This novel is a daring attack. The author, whoever he maybe, 
 is a clever writer, and the pictures of the seamy side of idle London life are described by 
 him with vivid power." 
 
 The Outlook. — "Something wrong-headed, sensual, and Corellian is anticipated, nor 
 is one disappointed. . . . Bound to command the public." 
 
 Cliristiail World. — " A pungent, cleverly-written, and altogether out-of-the-common- 
 rut Society novel. The author unsparingly exposes the ' little ways ' of smart people. . . . 
 Every sane reader will wish the author success in his eflForts to expose the hoUowness and 
 rottenness of ' aristocratic virtuous London.' " 
 
 The North Star.—" The book is of a most daring character, but the author has 
 treated his theme in a very clever manner. . . . Messrs _W. H. Smith & Son refuse to 
 circulate ' Shams,' objecting to it on moral grounds. This act on their part, however, 
 will not greatly interfere with the sale of the book, which really castigates vice. We 
 believe it will be as widely read as the works of Ouida and Marie Corelli." 
 
 Romance of a Harem. Translated from the 
 French of " Dans L'ombre du Harem " by Clarence Forestier- 
 Walker. Crown Svo, art vellum, 5s. 
 
 The Idealist, a Realistic Roman-a-clef. By Grove 
 Johnson. Crown Svo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Zoroastro. An Historical Romance. By Creswick J. 
 
 Thompson, Author of " Poison Romance and Poison Mysteries," 
 "The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy," etc. 
 Crown Svo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 To-day. — "There is no lack of excitement in ' Zoroastro.' The tale is a good one, and 
 
 should be popular." 
 
 St James's Gazette. — " A sound and entertaining piece of work." 
 
 Universe.—" a splendidly-written romance of a sixteenth-century magician, and there 
 
 is no lack of interest throughout the book. The various ideas of the time, descriptions 
 
 of the customs and modes of living, are cleverly woven into the story." 
 
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 Qreenins: & Co., Ltd., Publishers 19 
 
 The Sword of Fate. An interesting Novel. By 
 
 Henry Herman, Author of "Eagle Joe," "Scarlet Fortune," etc., 
 
 and Joint Author of the " Silver King," "Claudian." Crown 8vo, 
 
 art cloth, 6s, 
 
 Vanity Fair says : — "The hand that wrote the ' Silver King ' has by no means lost its 
 cunning in painting broad effects of light and shadow. The description of life in Broad- 
 moor is, we fancy, done from actual observation. It is quite new." And the critic of 
 Black and Wmtesums it up pithily as "A story which holds our attention and in- 
 terests us right from the first chapter. The book is as exciting as even a story of sen- 
 sation h:is any need to be." Speaking of the scene of Mr Herman's drama, the beautiful 
 county of Devonshire, where the greater part of the story takes place, the ManClieBter 
 Courier says : "The author's descriptive powers vividly portray the lovely spots by the 
 winding Tamar, while the rich dialect of the district is so faithfully reproduced as to be- 
 come not the least feature of an exciting tale." 
 
 Outrageous Fortune. Being the Confessions of 
 
 Evelyn Gray, Hospital Nurse. A Story founded on fact, proving 
 that truth is stranger than fiction. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Liverpool Review. — "A smart, anonymous novel. The story is capitally written, and 
 
 is extremely interesting. EveljTi Gray's adventures are narrated in a style so realistic as 
 
 to leave the impression that the writer is either a medical man or one who has had very 
 
 intimate acquaintance with hospital life." 
 
 Lloyd's. — "A strong book, and one that readers will find interesting. It is undoubtedly 
 
 clever and well written." 
 
 Dally GrapMc. — " The characters are cleverly drawn, and the revelations of hospital 
 
 life, of private nursing, and of the manners and customs of the ' celibate ' clergy should 
 
 ensure the volume considerable popularity." 
 
 Seven Nights with Satan. A Novel. By j. L. 
 
 Owen, Author of " The Great Jekyll Diamond." Cover designed 
 by W. S. Rogers. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 St James's Gazette.—" We have read the book from start to finish with unflagging 
 interest — an interest, by the way, which derives nothing from the ' spice,' for though its 
 title may be suggestive of Zolaism, there is not a single passage which is open to ob- 
 jection. The literary style is good." 
 
 Truth. — "I much prefer the ghastly story 'Seven Nights with Satan,' a very clever 
 study of degeneration." 
 
 The Green Passion. The study of a jealous Soui. 
 
 A Powerful Novel. By Anthony P. Vert. Cover designed by 
 Alfred Praga. Crown 8vo, art cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Mr Douglas Sladen in The Queen. — " A remarkably clever book. . . . There is no 
 disputing the ability with which the vn-iter handles her subject. I say her subject, 
 because the minuteness of the touches, and the odd, forcible style in which this book is 
 written, point to it being the work of a female hand. The book is an eminently read- 
 able one, and it is never dull for a minute." 
 
 The Monitor.—" A wonderful piece of writing. The only modem parallel we can find 
 is supplied in Mr F. C. Philipps's ' As in a Looking Glass.' " 
 
 Whitehall Review. — " in ' The Green Passion ' the author traces with much ability, 
 and not a little analytical insight, the progress of jealousy in the breast of a wornan who 
 is born with a very ' intense,' although not a very deep, nature. . . . There is in Mr 
 Vert's work a certain tendency tow.-irds realism which has its due effect in making his 
 characters real. They are no loosely-built fancies of the journalistic brain, but portraits 
 — almost snapshot portraits — of men and women of to-day." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 An Idol of Bronze. An Exciting Novel of Life in 
 Western America. By Louise Palmer Heaven, Author of 
 " Chata and Chinita ? " Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s, 6d. 
 
 Our Lady of the Ice. An interesting Story of 
 Alpine Adventure. By Miss Constance SuTCLiFFE. Crown 
 8vo, ornamental cloth, 6s. 
 
 Madonna Mia, and other stories. By Clement 
 Scott, Author of " The Wheel of Life," *' Sisters by the Sea," 
 etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Funch. — '"Madonna Mia' is genuinely interesting. All the stories are good; you are 
 ' Scott free ' to pick 'em where you like." (The Baron de B. W.) 
 
 Weekly Sun. — "Shows Mr Scott's sturdy character-painting and love of picturesque 
 adventure." 
 
 World. — " Clement Scott is nothing if not sympathetic, and every one of the ten stories 
 is not only thoroughly readable, but is instinct with sentiment ; for Mr Scott still retains 
 a wonderful enthusiasm, usually the attribute of youth. 'Drifting' is a very fresh and 
 convincing narrative, founded, we understand, upon truth, and containing within a small 
 compass the materials for a very stirring drama. ' A Cross of Heather,' too, is a charm- 
 ing romance, told with real pathos and feeling." 
 
 The Dolomite Cavern. An Exciting Tale of Ad 
 venture. By W. Patrick Kelly, Author of " Schoolboys Three," 
 etc. Crown Svo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Observer. — "A story full of exciting adventure." 
 Saturday Review. — " The plot is ingenious, and the style pleasant." 
 Daily Telegraph. — " Lovers of the sensational in fiction will find abundance of con- 
 genial entertainment in Mr W. P. Kelly's new story. In the way of accessories to 
 startling situations all is fish that comes to this ingenious author's net. The wonders of 
 primitive nature, the marvels of latter-day science, the extravagances of human passion — 
 all these he dexterously uses for the purpose of involving his hero in perilous scrapes from 
 wliich he no less dexterously extricates him by expedients which, however far-fetched 
 they may appear to the unimaginative, are certainly not lacking in originality of device 
 or cleverness of construction. . . . Tliis is a specimen incident — those which succeed it 
 derive their special interest from the action of Rontgen rays, subterranean torrents, and 
 devastating inundations. The book is very readable throughout, and ends happily. 
 What more can the average novel reader wish for in holiday time ? " 
 
 The Lady of the Leopard, a Powerful and 
 
 Fascinating Novel. By Chas. L'Epine, Author of " The De\nl in 
 a Domino." A new edition. Crown Svo, art cloth, 6s. 
 
 Public Opinion.— "A remarkable book._. . . We are plunged into a delicious and 
 tantalising romance ; incident follows incident like a panorama of exciting pictures. 
 Fertility of imagination is everywhere apparent, and the denouement is artfully 
 concealed till it bursts upon the reader with a suddenness that fairly takes away his 
 breath." 
 
 Liverpool Post. — " A very skilfully-constructed story, mysterious and strange, with a 
 natural explanation suggested of all the mystery which does not spoil one's enjoyment 
 (here follows analysis of plot). This is the bare outline of the story up to a certain point ; 
 it is impossible to convey adequately an idea of the awe-inspiring characteristics of the 
 story. Readers can safely be recommended to turn to the book itself." 
 
 The Love Thirst of Elaine, a Powerful 
 
 Novel. By Justin Hannaford. Crown Svo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 ao Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 2i 
 
 Miss Malevolent, a Realistic Study of Modern Life 
 
 in London. By the Author of "The Hypocrite." Second 
 
 edition, with a new Preface. Art cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Saturday Review.— "The great novel-reading public, which found 'The Hypocrite' 
 to its taste, will not be disappointed in the author's latest effort. The writer has a knack 
 of character-presentment which means that his people live ; he has a dramatic instinct ; 
 he is at times on the verge of real wit ; he knows certain phases of literary and artistic 
 life well ; and his story is original enough to hold the interest throughout." 
 St James's Gazette.— " it is decidedly clever. ... An improvement on 'The 
 Hypocrite.' There is real power shown in the drawing of Kitty Nugent." 
 Scotsman. — "You don't get far into this novel— about a couple of pages— before the 
 epigrams begin exploding and the repartee detonating, and the subtle terse and quart of 
 wit with wit fuffuffing, like so many squibs and cr.ickers on the Queen's Birthday ; and 
 this coruscation is kept up in a way to make your hair curl.'until the end of the story. . . . 
 The author has abundant literary aptitudes, exemplified over and over again by the pages 
 of this clever book." 
 
 QREENINQ & CO.'S 
 
 POPULAR HALF=CROWN NOVELS 
 
 Well Printed in Large T3rpe, and Strongly Bound in 
 Artistically- Designed Cloth Covers. 
 
 ^Ae yfj/poeiite. a Modem Realistic Novel of Oxford 
 
 and London Life. By the Author of " Miss Malevolent," " From 
 
 the Book Beautiful," etc., etc. Seventh Impression. Crown 8vo, 
 
 cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 %• This hook has been " boycotted" by Messrs Mudie and Messrs IV. H. Smith 6f Son 
 as being ' ' unfit to circulate in their libraries, " yet it has been praised by the press 
 at being " a powerful sermon and a moral book." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " a book by an anonymous author always arouses a certain inquiry, 
 and when the book is clever and original the interest becomes keen, and conjecture is rife, 
 endowing the most unlikely people with authorship. ... It is very brilliant, very 
 forcible, very sad. ... It is perfect in its way, in style clear, sharp and forcible, the 
 dialogue epigrammatic and sparkling. . . . Enough has been said to show that ' The 
 Hypocrite' is a striking and powerful piece of work, and that its author has established 
 his claim to be considered a writer of originality and brilliance." 
 
 ^he Traffedj/ Of the ^aefj^ 9a(miU 
 
 By W. Luther Longstaff, Author of " Weeds and Flowers," 
 
 etc. An exciting tale, descriptive of the " Behind- the-Scenes of 
 
 the Palmist's Bohemia." Crown Svo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Literature. — "The story strikes the fresh note of having been lived, experienced, .ind 
 
 does not come to one as a stale invention. There is human nature in it, and passion, 
 
 of a kind : tragedy too. . . . We should say, ' Read the book by all means.' " 
 
 Echo. — " Its general air of out-Bourget-ing Bourget. You will ' see life ' in its story, no 
 
 doubt, for it has a measure of pathos, insight and power, but most certainly you will not 
 
 see life steadily." 
 
 Morning Leader. — "Vivid with the strange lusts and cruel desires of an imagination 
 
 enslaved to the body . . . powerful enough in the imaginative treatment of the characters. 
 
 . . . The luridness is simply Titanic." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 22 Qreening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 C^ Tllonte ^arfo. a Tale by Henryk Sien- 
 KiEwicz, Author of "Quo Vadis," "With Fire and Sword," 
 etc., etc. Translated by S. C. de SoissoNS. Crown 8vo, art 
 cloth, with a new Portrait of the Author, 2s. 6d. 
 
 M .A, p. — " Very light and dainty in its tone. ' In Monte Carlo ' is a typical example of 
 the work of the great Polish writer. ... It is the old, old tale of a man with a maid — 
 plus a lady with the instincts of the vampire, who lives in the gambling hell of Europe." 
 Pall Mall Gazettft — "It is beyond all question the work of a great artist. It is 
 subtly analytical and psychologically true. So triumphant is the art of the Polish novelist 
 that we follow the story with lively sympathy and unflagging interest. ... It is always 
 interesting ; the clear, able and convincing portrayal of the two leading characters gives 
 the book its chief value. There are wise sayings and occasional epigrams, and the 
 thumbnail sketches of Mrs Elsen's lovers are wholly admirable." 
 
 Tlljf ^adj/ Tiudy and So^n JSa^iYeon : 
 
 Chief of Police. Two stories by G. F. Monkshood, Author 
 of " Rudyard Kipling : The Man and His Work," etc. Cloth, 
 2s. 6d. 
 
 Monitor. — " My Lady Ruby' is charming, and as witty as she is charming. . . . 
 ' John Basileon ' evmces imagination and subtlety of a highly vivid and intense quality. 
 The note of the book is modern, but of a modernity far removed from that of the term 
 understood by the French Symbolists and the English Degenerates. Messrs Greening 
 & Co. are to be congratulated on a publication which is likely to arouse considerable 
 attention in those literary circles from which approbation is praise indeed." 
 
 " baffle, the Giddier. " a story of Literary and 
 Theatrical Life. By S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth, new and cheaper edition, 2s. 6d. 
 
 QrE^MC. — " The volume will please and amuse numberless people." 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "A pleasant, cheery stoi-y. Displays a rich vein of robust 
 imagination." 
 
 Standard. — "There are many pleasant pages in 'Fame, the Fiddler,' which reminds 
 us of ' Trilby,' with its pictures of Bohemian life, and its happy-go-lucky group of good- 
 hearted, generous scribblers, artists and playwrights. Some of the characters are so true 
 to life that it is impossible not to recogiiise them. Among the best incidents in the 
 volume must be mentioned the production of Pryor's play, and the account of poor 
 Jimmy Lambert's death, which is as moving an incident as we have read for a long 
 time. Altogether, ' Fame, the Fiddler ' is a very human book, and an amusing one 
 as well." 
 
 S)ara6'4 'Slfine^^Up, and other Powerful and 
 Vividly- Written Stories. By Bart Kennedy, Author of "The 
 Wandering Romanoff," etc. New and cheaper Edition. Crown 
 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 St James's Budget.— " A volume characteristic of the author's splendid powers." 
 M. A. P, — "Mr Kennedy writes powerfully, and can grip the reader's imagination, or 
 whirl it off into the strangest domains of glamour and romance at will. . . . There is a 
 future for this clever young man from Tipperary. He will do great things." 
 Critic. — "Of a highly imaginative order, and distinctly out of the ordinary run. . . . 
 The author has a remarkable talent for imaginative and dramatic presentation. He sets 
 before himself a higher standard of achievement than most young writers of fiction." 
 Cork Herald. — " Gracefully_ written, easy and attractive in diction and style, the 
 stories are as choice a collection as we have happened on for a long time. They are 
 clever ; they are varied ; they are fascinating. We admit them into the sacred circle of 
 the most beautiful that have been told by the most sympathetic and skilled writers. . . . 
 Mr Kennedy has a style, and that is rare enough nowadays — as refreshing as it is 
 rare." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening- & Co., Ltd., Publishers 23 
 
 Wo/ia jiufina. a Nineteenth Century Romance. 
 
 Being a Story of Carlist Conspiracy. By Heuer Daniels, Author 
 of " Our Tenants." Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 Lady. — "A thrilling romance with a mediaval atmosphere, although the scene Is laid 
 in the Cotswolds in the year of grace 1898. The story is well constructed, and is a good 
 example of the widely-imaginative type of fiction that is so eagerly devoured by young 
 people nowadays." 
 
 Eastern Mornillg News. — " Readers will be fascinated by the stirring scenes, the 
 swiftly-moving panorama, the enacted tragedies, the wild, passionate, lawless loves 
 depicted in the most sensational manner in this volume." 
 
 ^Ord ^'mmj/. a story of Muslc-Hall Life. By 
 
 George Martyn. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 Outlook. — "The book is both humorous and dramatic." 
 
 Vanity Fair.—" The author has a peculiar knowledge of the ' Halls ' and those who 
 frequent them ; and especially, as it seems to us, of those Jewish persons who sometimes 
 run them. And he has made good use of his knowledge here. But there is more than 
 this in the book ; for ' George Martyn ' has considerable descriptive talent. His account, 
 for instance, of the fi^ht between the hero and the butcher is quite good. The story is 
 straightforward, convincing, and full of human nature and promise." 
 
 Ti/ie TSfanden'nff Tiomanoff. a Romance. By 
 
 Bart Kennedy, Author of •' A Man Adrift," " Darab's .Wine- 
 Cup," etc. New and Cheaper Edition, crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 The Outlook. — "Mr Bart Kennedy, a young writer of singular imaginative gifts, and 
 
 a style as individual as Mr Kipling's. . . . The writing of this story is strongly original 
 
 in manner. . . . A powerful book." 
 
 Weekly Times- — The Wandering Romanoff' is really good work. . . . We have 
 
 read nothing finer for a long while." 
 
 j4 T^ra^edj/ of "^md kftreet By s. j. adair 
 
 Fitz-Gkrald, Author of "Fame the Fiddler." A new and 
 cheaper edition of this popular book, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 ^/l€ *S(it€6 of Temptation, a Natural Novel by 
 
 Mrs Albert S. Bradshaw, Author of " False Gods," " Wife or 
 Slave," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2S. 6d. 
 
 Uidland MaiL — " The characters are vividly drawn. There are many pleasant and 
 painful incidents in the book, which is interesting from beginning to end." 
 Aberdeen Free Press. — " Mrs Bradshaw has written several good novels, and the 
 outstanding feature of all of them has been her skilful development of plot, and her taste- 
 ful, pleasing style. In connection with the present story we are able to amply reiterate 
 those praises. The plot again is well developed and logically carried out, while the 
 language used by the authoress is always happy and well chosen, and never common- 
 place. . . . The story is a very powerful one indeed, and may be highly commended as 
 a piece of painstaking fiction of the very highest kind." 
 
 inad i An Exciting Story of Predestination. By J. 
 
 Pym Loughnan. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2S. 6d. 
 Evening Times. — " We must congratulate Mr Loughnan on his originality in con- 
 ceiving an extraordinary character, and on working out the story with quite blood- 
 curdling thrill." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — " if the leading idea of the story is a little exaggerated, there can 
 be no doubt as to the skill with which the author has worked out the details." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 24 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 ^/t€ dSacfy of ^n'6u)0{d. a sensational Story. By 
 Leonard Outram. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 North British Advertiser.— "A thrilling tale of love and madness." 
 
 Whitehall Review. — " No one can complain of lack of sensation, it is full of startling 
 
 episodes. The characters are drawn with a rapid and vigorous touch. The interest 
 
 is well maintained." 
 
 Court Circular, — " It reminds us forcibly of a story in real life that engrossed public 
 
 attention many years ago. Whether this was in the author's mind we cannot say, but 
 
 the book is deeply interesting, the characters well and strongly drawn, and we doubt 
 
 not this tale will fascinate many a reader." 
 
 ^he Tie^urreetion of SCk ^raee. Being the 
 
 very candid Confessions of the Honourable Bertie Beauclerc. 
 A Sporting Novel. By Campbell Rae-Brown, Author of 
 "The Shadow on the Manse." Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Scotsman. — "The book is lightly and briskly written throughout. Its pleasant 
 
 cynicism is always entertaining." 
 
 St James's Budget. — "A sporting romance which is indisputably cleverly written. 
 
 . . . The book is full of interesting items of sporting life which are fascinating to lover? 
 
 of the turf." 
 
 Sporting Life. — "The character of the heartless roue,, who tells his story, is very well 
 
 sustained, and the rich paruetfu, Peter Drewitt, the owner of the favourite that is very 
 
 nearly nobbled by the unscrupulous Beauclerc, is cleverly drawn. Altogether it is an 
 
 exciting and an uncommon tale, and is quite correct in all the sporting details." 
 
 s4nna Tflar^den'^ 'Sxperiment, An interesting 
 
 Novel. By Ellen Williams. Crown 8vo, art cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Outlook. — "A good story cleverly told and worked out." 
 
 Echo. — " A very natural and interesting tale is carefully set forth in Ellen Williams's 
 clever little book." 
 
 Monitor. — "Miss Williams has here seized on an original concept, and given it fitting 
 presentation. The ' experiment ' is a novel one, and its working out is a deft piece of 
 writing. The psychology of the work is faultless, and this study of a beautiful tempera- 
 ment, in a crude frame, has with it the verity of deep observation and acute insight. . . . 
 We await with considerable confidence Miss Williams's next venture." 
 Sheffield Independent. — " The writer has treated a delicate and unusual situation 
 with delicacy and originality. The heroine's character is drawn with firmness and clear- 
 ness, and the whole story is vivid and picturesque. . . . The history of the experiment 
 is exceedingly well told. Keen insight into character, and cleverness in its delineation, 
 as well as shrewd observation and intense sympathy, mark the writer's work, while the 
 style is terse and clear, and the management of trying scenes extremely good." 
 
 ^ai^t^€6t ^Otith, Being an account of the Startling 
 
 Discovery made by the Wise Antarctic Expedition. A Humorous 
 Story. By Harold E. Gorst, Author of "Without Bloodshed," 
 " Sketches of the Future," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Dally Graphic. — "Very easy, light reading, and reminds one of 'Three Men in a 
 
 Boat.' Just the book for a railway journey." 
 
 Bookman. — "A lively and very amusing tale of a wonderful discovery made by the 
 
 Wise Antarctic E.\pedition." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — "An amusing skit on Polar expeditions. . . . The book contains 
 
 plenty of fun." 
 
 Whitehall Review. — " It is an amusing'book, worth reading by those who are on the 
 
 lookout for a hearty laugh." 
 
 Vanity Fair.— "An amusing little book. It is very good fooling, and good fooling is 
 
 sometimes better than heavy wisdom." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Qreening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 25 
 
 ^n TlnCanni/ )§ir{. a story. By Marie M. Sadleir, 
 
 Author of " Such is the Law," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Daily Telegraph.— "A remarkable t.ile. The narrative teems with surprises. . . . 
 There is plenty of ' go ' in 'An Uncanny Girl." " 
 
 Sir Edward Russell says in Liverpool POBt :— " A very clever and subtle story. . . . 
 The action is exciting, and the invention of incidents adroit. But beyond this popular 
 merit there is that of clever and characteristic description. . . . Mrs Sadleir is ingenious 
 as a story-teller, and vigorous and pungent as a writer." 
 
 ^he Cigarette y^mo/ier. a Powerful and 
 
 Daring Story. By the Author of "The Hypocrite." Crown 
 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 CHEAPER FICTION 
 
 ^Ae ^ere/i'et and 7ommj/. By the Author of 
 
 " 'Twixt the Devil and the Deep Sea." Cloth, top edge gilt, 2s. 
 
 GraplliO. — " A simple story invested with an unusual distinction and charm." 
 
 QlaSgfO'W Times. — " A capital tale. Entertaining reading." 
 
 Nottingham Guardian. — "A romance which holds one's interest enthralled." 
 
 Literary World. — "The story has a franlc directness and a reality that make it 
 
 thoroughly readable. . . . The story is well expressed and the characters have vitality. 
 
 Altogether a satisfactory little tale." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — The story is out of the common, both in manner and treatment." 
 
 Lloyd's. — " Clear and brilliant." 
 
 £n€ jfoiacA lUHp. Alexandre Dumas's Celebrated 
 Romance. Translated by S. Adair Fitz-Gerald. Illustrated 
 with Portraits. 260 pp. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 2s. 
 
 Peiican jaiY4. a collection of smart, up-to-date Tales 
 of Modern Life, written, edited and selected by Frank M. Boyd 
 (Editor of "The Pelican.") One of the most popular and enter- 
 taining volumes of short stories that has ever been published. An 
 ideal companion for a railway journey or a spare hour or two. 
 Demy 8vo, picture wrapper designed and drawn by W. S. Rogers, 
 
 IS. 
 
 ^e* S)€t)iy m a domino, a Psychological Mystery. 
 By Chas. L'Epine, Author of "The Lady of the Leopard," 
 "Miracle Plays," etc. Long i2mo, cloth, is. 
 
 Truth. — "The story is written with remarkable literary skill, and, notwithstanding its 
 gruesoraeness, is undeniably fascinating." 
 
 Sketch. — " It is a well-written story. An admirable literary style, natural and concise 
 construction, succeed in compelling the reader's attention through every line. We hope 
 to welcome the author again, working on a larger scene." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 26 Greening & Co., Ltd,, Publishers 
 
 Q/Mffi/0ll)4. A Series of Side Lights on Modern Society. 
 By Ernest Martin. (Dedicated to Sir Henry Irving.) Crown 
 8vo, art cloth, gilt tops, 2s. 
 
 Western Mercury. — "Clever sketches, intensely dramatic, original and forceful, 
 
 based on scenes from actual life, and narrated with much skill." 
 
 Weekly Times. — "A series of pictures sketched with considerable power. The last 
 
 one, ' Hell in Paradise,' is terrible in the probable ti-uth of conception." 
 
 Northern Figaro. — "Mr Martin's descriptive paragraphs are couched in trenchant, 
 
 convincing language, without a superfluous word sandwiched in anywhere. . . . 
 
 I Shadows' may be read with much profit, and will give more than a superficial insight 
 
 into various phases of society life and manners." 
 
 U)€at^ and the TUfoman. a Powerful Tale. By 
 Arnold Golsworthy. Picture cover drawn by Sydney H. 
 SiME. Crown 8vo, is. 
 
 Literary World. — "We do not remember having read a book that possessed the 
 quality of grip in a greater degree than is the case with ' Death and the Woman.' . . . 
 Every page of every chapter develops the interest, which culminates in one of the most 
 sensational denouetuents it has been our lot to read. The flavour of actuality is not 
 destroyed by any incredible incident ; it is the inevitable thing that always happens. 
 ' Death and the Woman ' will supply to the brim the need of those in search of a holding 
 drama of modern London life." 
 
 ^ike Weffou) " y{l44€n^€r6. a Mystery and its 
 Solution. A Detective Story. By RiviNGTON Pyke, Author of 
 "The Man who Disappeared." Long i2mo, cloth, is. 
 
 Wlliteball Review. — "Those who love a mystery with plenty of 'go,' and a story 
 which is not devoid of a certain amount of realism, cannot do better than pick up ' Fellow- 
 Passengers.' The characters are real men and women, and not the sentimental and 
 artificial puppets to which we have been so long accustomed by our sensationalists. The 
 book is brightly written, and of detective stories it is the best 1 have read lately."., 
 
 Ti^af ^a^einatin^ Wi'dou), and other Frivolous 
 and Fantastic Tales, for River, Road and Rail. By S. J. Adair 
 Fitz-Gerald. Long i2mo, cloth, is. 
 
 The Referee. — "Another little humorous book is 'That Fascinating Widow,' by Mr S. 
 J. Adair Fitz-Gerald, who can be very funny when he tries. The story which gives the 
 title to the book would make a capital farce. ' The Blue-blooded Coster ' is an amusing 
 piece of buffoonery." 
 
 The Globe. — " The author, Mr S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald, has already shown himself to be 
 the possessor of a store of humour, on which he has again drawn for the furnishing of the 
 little volume he has just put together. Among the tales included are several which might 
 be suitable for reading or recitation, and none which are dull. Mr Fitz-Gerald frankly 
 addresses himself to that portion of the public which desires nothing so much as to be 
 amused, and likes even its amusements in small doses. Such a public will entertain itself 
 very pleasantly with Mr Fitz-Gerald's lively tales, and will probably name as its favourites 
 those titled ' Pure Cussedness,' ' Splidgings' First Baby,' and ' The Blue-blooded Coster.'" 
 
 Mtip i/an 'Wl'nhfe, together with " The Legend of 
 Sr.KEPY Hollow." By Washington Irving. Illustrated with 
 Drawings by W. G. Mein. Crown 8vo, art cloth, decorative 
 cover by Will Smart, top edge gilt, 2s. 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 27 
 
 Illustrated Books for Children 
 
 ^he ^rand I^anjandrum, and other fanciful Fairy 
 Tales for the youthful of all Ages, Climes and Times. By S. J. 
 Adair Fitz-Gerai.d, Author of "The Zankiwank and the 
 Blelherwitch," etc. Many full-page and smaller Illustrations by 
 GusTAVE Darr^. Second Edition. Square 8vo, art cloth, gilt, 
 3s. 6d. 
 
 Tnith. — " A decided acquisition to the children's library." 
 
 Ladies' Pictorial. — " Quite one of the brightest of the season's gift books." 
 
 Morning Post.— " Bright and thoroughly amusing. It will please all children. The 
 pictures are excellent." 
 
 EcllO.— "Of the pile (of children's books) before us, Mr Adair Fitz-Gerald's 'Grand 
 Panjandram ' is the cleverest. Mr Fitz-Gerald needs no introduction to the nursery of 
 these days." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette.— "A charming little book. Simply written, and therefore to be 
 comprehended of the youthful mind. It will be popular, for the writer has a power of 
 pleasing which is rare." 
 
 Literary World. — "A handsomely-bound, mouth-watering, in every way up-to-date 
 volume, written especially for and on behalf of the toddler or the newly breeched." 
 
 People. — "A delightful story for children, something in the style of 'Alice in Wonder- 
 land,' but also having some flavour of ICingley's ' Water Babies.'" 
 
 Sun. — "Good fairy stories are a source of everlasting joy and delight. Mr Adair Fitz- 
 Gerald breaks fresh ground and writes pleasantly. . . . The book has the added 
 advantage of being charmingly illustrated in colour by Gustave Dorii." 
 
 Weekly Sun. — ''Mr Adair Fitz-Gerald is a well-known writer of fairy stories and 
 humorous books for the young. 'The Grand Panjandrum' is just the sort of book to 
 please youngsters of all ages, being full of pleasant imaginings, and introducing its 
 readers to a host of curious people." 
 
 7lon6en6€ 9lum6er6 and Soeufar c^>/y/^j 
 
 For Funny Little Folk. Written by Druid Grayl, with 
 full-page Illustrations by Walter J. Morgan. 4to, cloth 
 boards, 3s. 6d. 
 
 St James's Gazette. — " Full of quaint pictures, which will delight and amuse the 
 little folks." 
 
 Record. — "A really witty book. Just the sort of nonsense that appeals to little folk, 
 and the pictures are quite laughable. There is an abundance of really good humour to 
 be got from these pages, which are altogether free from vulgarity." 
 
 World. — "Appeals directly to children, and would make a delightful present for any 
 little boy or girl." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — " Will be productive of many a happy half-hour." 
 
 Lloyd's Newspaper. — "A very amusing book indeed is this volume of nonsense verse. 
 The jingles are excellent and such as children delight in, while the pictures are also 
 ludicrously funny." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 28 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 Greening's Humorous Books 
 
 ^he ^iHjfpin^fe ^a4t0ra{6. a series of Amusing 
 Rustic Tales and Sketches. By Druid Grayl. Profusely Illus- 
 trated by Walter J. Morgan. Crown 8vo, art cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 Vanity Fair. — "Most certainly entertaining, and readers will enjoy it. It is well 
 
 illustrated." 
 
 Scotsman. — "A lively book of comical yarns. It is frivolous, doubtless, but it is funny, 
 
 and any reader will like it who enjoys a hearty laugh." 
 
 Outlook. — "The stories are well told, and tend to provoke laughter." 
 
 Phoenix. — "A delightful collection of stories. There is something refreshing and 
 
 invigorating about them." 
 
 Literary world. — " An amusing bit of humour." 
 
 Midland Mail. — " A budget of fun, and good fun too. There is not a dull page in it. 
 
 7he jTOfffe Pap€r6, written by Tristram Coutts, 
 Author of "A Comedy of Temptation." Illustrated by L. Raven 
 Hill. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Sheffield Daily Telegraph.— "Anyone who wants a good laugh should get 'The 
 Pottle Papers.' They are very droll reading for an idle afternoon, or picking up at 
 any time when ' down in the dumps.' They are very brief and very bright, and it is 
 impossible for anyone with the slightest sense of humour to read the book without 
 bursting into ' the loud guffaw ' which does not always ' bespeak the empty mind.' " 
 Fall Mall Gazette. — " it contains plenty of boisterous humour of the Max Adeler 
 kind . . . humour that is genuine and spontaneous. The author, for all his antics, has 
 a good deal more in him than the average buffoon. There is, for e.\ample, a very clever 
 and subtle strain of feeling running through the comedy in ' The Love that Burned '—a 
 rather striking bit of work. Mr Raven Hill's illustrations are as amusing as they 
 always are." 
 
 ^he ]Pott{€'6 J^rOffr€66, Being the Further Adven- 
 tures of Mr and Mrs Pottle. By Tristram Coutts, Author of 
 "The Pottle Papers," etc. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. (In preparation.) 
 
 ^an ^enO, yfl/6 jSooAe. a volume of Fnvoli- 
 ties : Autobiographical, Historical, Philosophical, Anecdotal and 
 Nonsensical. Written by Dan Leno. Profusely illustrated by 
 Popular Artists. Seventh Edition. Crown 8vo, art cloth, gilt 
 edges, IS. 6d. Popular Edition, sewed, picture cover, 6d. 
 
 DAN LENO, HYS BOOKE, is, says the Liverpool Review, " the funniest publication 
 
 since ' Three Men in a Boat. ' In this autobiographical masterpiece the inimitable King 
 
 of Comedians tells his life story in a style that would make a shrimp laugh." 
 
 This enormously successful book of genuine and spontaneous humour has been received 
 
 with a complete chorus of complimentary criticisms and pleasing ''Press" praise and 
 
 approval. Here are a few reviewers' remarks : — 
 
 Scotsman. — "Bombshells of fun." 
 
 Lloyd's. — " One long laugh from start to finish." 
 
 Globe. — '' Full of exuberant and harmless fun." 
 
 English Illustrated Magazine.— " A deliciously humorous volume." 
 
 Catholic Times.—" The fun is fast and furious." 
 
 St Faul'S. — '' It is very funny." 
 
 These are a few opinions taken at random from hundreds of notices. 
 
 Says the Daily News (Hull) : — "The funniest book we have read for some time. You 
 
 must perforce scream with huge delight at the dry sayings and writings of the funny 
 
 little man who has actually killed people with his patter and his antics. Page after page 
 
 of genuine fun is reeled off by the great little man." 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 29 
 
 JSae^efor iSaffad^ and other Lazy Lyrics. By 
 Harry A. Spurr, Author of "A Cockney in Arcadia." With 
 Fifty Illustrations by John IIassall. Crown 8vo, art cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 St James's Gazette.— '-Distinctly clever." 
 
 Globe. — "Mr Spurr goes in for humour, and with very considerable success. . . . 
 
 Altogether he is as funny as he is fluent. Mr Hassall's illustrations are also genuinely 
 
 comic." 
 
 Nottingham Guardian.— "The fun is genuine and hearty." 
 Weekly Sun.—" These ' Bachelor Ballads' are excellent fun." 
 
 Literary World. — "The book is good from beginning to end, and its excellent illus- 
 trations by John Hassall are fittingly humorous." 
 
 Sheffield Independent. — "It is a rare thing to find humour in rhyme without vul- 
 garity, and fun without feebleness. One is, as a rule, inclined to laugh too rarely with 
 the joking poet, and sigh often at the pity of his hideous staleness. Mr Spurr is the 
 exception. His unostentatious rhymes abound in neat literary turns, brim with good 
 humour, and jig to a natural sprightliness. He can pass, too, the test of persistent 
 punning without causing the gorge of the reader to rise. In brief, he is a really humorous 
 versifier, and the illustrator of his work has happily caught his spirit. A man who can 
 turn out in thirty-two lines twenty-five puns on cricket, and work in a love story too, may 
 be regarded as having shouldered the mantle of Hood." 
 
 7hat %i4€matm^ ^I'dou). By s. j. a. fitz- 
 
 Gerald. Cloth, is. {For particulars see page 26.) 
 
 7arth€6t ^OUth. a Humorous Story. By Harold 
 E. GORST. 2s. 6d. {^For particulars see page 2^.") 
 
 Guides, Etc. 
 
 dUOndon, a Handy Guide for the Visitor, Sportsman and 
 Naturalist. By J. W. CuNDALL. Numerous Illustrations. 
 Fourth Year of Publication. Long i2mo, cloth, 6d. 
 
 Vanity Fair. — ^^"A capital little guide book. No bulky volume this, but a handy 
 booklet full of pithy information on all the most important subjects connected with our 
 great city." 
 
 Outlook. — " A handy booklet, more tasteful than one Is accustomed to." 
 
 Pelican. — "As full of useful and entertaining information as is an egg of meat." 
 
 Bookman. — "A very lively and readable little guide." 
 
 To-day. — "One of the best guide books for visitors to London. It is a model of 
 
 lucidity and informativeness, and the profuse illustrations are admirably executed." 
 
 Glasgow Herald. — "A useful little work for those who have no desire to wade 
 
 through many pages of information before getting what they want." 
 
 ^men'ea ^droad. a Handy Guide for Americans in 
 England. Edited by J. W. Cundali.. With Map and numerous 
 Illustrations. Eleventh Year of Publication. 6d. 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 3° 
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 tSn 2uamt '€a4t J^n^fia. Descriptive Sketches. 
 By T. West Carnie. Illustrated by W. S. Rogers. Long 
 l2mo, cloth, IS. (See page 8.) 
 
 " ^i6f€r6 6j/ the ^ea. " seaside and Country Sketches 
 
 By Clement Scott, Author of " Blossom Land," "Amongst the 
 Apple Orchards," Etc. Frontispiece and Vignette designed by 
 George Pownall. Long i2mo, attractively bound in cloth, is. 
 {Seepage i^.) 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adams, H. A Virtue of Necessity, . 17 
 Alexander, George. Introduction to 
 
 Art of Elocution, .... 6 
 
 After-Taste, The. (Compton Reade), 14 
 
 America Abroad. (J- W. Cundall), . 29 
 
 Ames, H. The Tragedy of a Pedigree, 1 3 
 Anna Marsden's Experiment. (E. 
 
 Williams), 24 
 
 And Afterwards. (Mrs H. E. 
 
 Gorst) 17 
 
 Apollo. Ideal Physical Culture, . 7 
 
 Asia, A Vagabond in. (E. Candler), 4 
 
 Asmodeus. (Le Sage), . . . 11 
 
 "yEsculapius." The Magnetism of Sin, 14 
 
 Ascher, Isidore. A Social Upheaval, 17 
 Ashes Tell no Tales. (Mrs A. S. 
 
 Bradshaw), 16 
 
 Bartram, George. Ballads of Ghostly 
 
 Shires, 9 
 
 Bachelor Ballads. (Harry A. Spurr), 29 
 Beckford, W. Vathek, . . .11 
 Black Tulip, The (Alexandre 
 
 Dumas) 11 and 25 
 
 Boyd, F. M. Pelican Tails, . . 25 
 
 Book of the Poster, A. (W. S. Rogers), 5 
 
 Book Beautiful, From the, . . 7 
 Bradshaw, Mrs A. S. Ashes Tell no 
 
 Tales 16 
 
 Bradshaw, Mrs A. S. Gates of 
 
 Temptation, The, . . . .23 
 Bye-Ways of Crime. (R. J. Power- 
 
 Berrey) 6 
 
 Candler, E. A Vagabond in Asia, 
 Carnie, T. W. In Quaint East Anglia, 
 Clelia. Messiahship of Shakspeare, 
 
 The, ... ... 
 
 Clelia. God in Shakspeare, 
 Cigarette Smoker, The. (Author of 
 
 "The Hypocrite"), 
 Comedy of Temptation, A. (T. Coutts), 
 Committed to His Charge. (Kate 
 
 and Robina Lizars), 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Colomba. (Prosper Merlm<e), . . ix 
 Corelli, Marie. Patriotism or Self- 
 
 Advertisement? .... 7 
 
 Coutts, T. The Pottle Papers, . _ . 28 
 
 Coutts, T. A Comedy of Temptation, 16 
 Croly, George. Salathiel, . . .11 
 
 Cry in the Night, A. (A. Golsworthy) 17 
 Cundall, J. W. London, . . .29 
 
 Cundall, J. W. America Abroad, . 29 
 
 Cynthia's Damages. (E. Turner), . 15 
 
 Dan Lend, Hys Booke. (Dan Leno), 28 
 
 Daniels, Heber. Dona Rufina, . . 23 
 
 Daughters of Plesisure. (De Brimont), 14 
 
 Darab's Wine-Cup. (Bart Kennedy), 22 
 
 Daudet. Sapho, 18 
 
 Dead Woman's Vow, A. (Emile Zola), 18 
 
 Death and the Woman. (Golsworthy), 26 
 De Bremont, Comtesse. A Son of 
 
 Africa, 15 
 
 De Br(5mont, Comtesse. Daughters 
 
 of Pleasure, 14 
 
 De Bremont, Comtesse. The Gentle- 
 man Digger, IS 
 
 De Soissons, Count. The Path of the 
 
 Soul 6 
 
 Derelict and Tommy, The. (C. 
 
 Forestier- Walker) 25 
 
 Detached Pirate, A. (Helen Milecete), 13 
 Devil in a Domino, The. (C. L'Epine), 25 
 Dona Rufina. (Heber Daniels), . 23 
 Downing, C. Messiahship of Shak- 
 speare, ...... 4 
 
 Downing, C. God in Shakspeare, . 5 
 
 Dolomite Cavern, The. (W. Kelly), . 20 
 
 Dress in a Nutshell. ("R."), . . g 
 
 Dumas. The Black 'Tulip, 11 and 25 
 
 East Anglia, In Quaint. (Carnie), 8 
 " English Writers of To-day " Series — 
 Rudyard Kipling. (G. F. Monks- 
 hood), 1 
 
 Bret Harte. (T. E. Pemberton), 2 
 
 Swinburne. (Theodore Wratislaw), 3 
 
 ao Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 Greenirije: & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 31 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " English Writers of To-Day "—confd. 
 
 (jeorge Meredith. (Walter Jerrold), 2 
 
 Hall Caine. (C. Fred. Kenyon), 2 
 
 A. W. Pinero. (Hamilton Fyffe), 2 
 
 W, E. Hen'ey. (George Gamble), 3 
 Mrs Humphry Ward, ( in one 
 Mrs Craigie, j volume. 
 
 (W. L. Courtney), ... 3 
 
 Thomas Hardy, .... 3 
 Realistic Writers of To-day. (J, 
 
 Hannaford) 3 
 
 The Parnassian School in English 
 
 Poetry. (Sir G. Douglas), . 3 
 Richard Le GulUene. (Ranger 
 
 Gull) 3 
 
 Elocution, The Art of. (R.Ferguson), 7 
 
 Epicurean, The. (Thomas Moore), . 11 
 
 Escott, T. H. S. A Trip to Paradoxia, 6 
 Exile in Bohemia, An. (Ernest E. 
 
 William.s), ...... 12 
 
 "Fame, the Fiddler." (S. J. Adair 
 
 Fitz-Gerald) 22 
 
 Farthest South. (H. G Gorst), . . 24 
 
 Ferguson, Ross. The Art of Elocution, 6 
 
 Ferreira, A. J. Nebo, ... 7 
 
 Fevez, Coralie. Ira Lorraine, . . 16 
 
 Fellow-Passengers, The. (R. Pyke), 26 
 Fitz-Gerald, S. J. A. A Tragedy of 
 
 Grub Street, 23 
 
 Fitz-Gerald, S. J. A. The Grand 
 
 Panjandrum, 27 
 
 Fitz-Gerald, S. J. A. That Fascinat- 
 ing Widow 27 
 
 Fitz-Gerald, S. J. A, Fame, the 
 
 Fiddler, 22 
 
 Forbes, Edmund. Red Fate, . , 13 
 
 For Himself Alone. (T.W.Speight), 15 
 Forestier- Walker, C. The Derelict 
 
 and Tommy, .... 25 
 
 Fouillie, Alfred. Woman, ... 5 
 
 France, Anatole. Thais, . . .18 
 
 From the Book Beautiful. (Author of 
 
 " The Hj-pocrite "), .... 7 
 
 Galt, J. Ringan Gilhaize, . . 10 
 Gates of Temptation, The. (Mrs A. 
 
 Bradshaw), 23 
 
 Gentleman Digger, The. (Comtesse 
 
 de Br^mont) 15 
 
 Girl of the North, The. (H. Milecete), 12 
 
 God in Shakspeare. (C. Downing), 5 
 
 Gorton, Lieut.-Col. The Maori War, 6 
 
 Gorst, H. E. Farthest South, . . 24 
 
 Gorst, Mrs H. And Afterwards, 17 
 
 Golsworthy, A. Death and the 
 
 Woman 26 
 
 Golsworthy, A. A Cry In the Night, 17 
 Grand Panjandrum, The. (S. J. A. 
 
 Fitz-Gerald), 27 
 
 Green, Percy B. AHistory of Nursery 
 
 Rhymes, ...... 10 
 
 Green P.'ission, The. (A. P. Vert), . 19 
 Grayl, Druid. Nonsense Numbers 
 
 and Jocular Jingles, . . .27 
 
 Grayl, Druid. Pillypingle Pastorals, 28 
 
 Guides, etc., 29 
 
 Hami.ets, Some Notable. (C. Scott), 3 
 Hannaford, Justin. The Love Thirst 
 
 of Elaine 20 
 
 page 
 
 Harem, Romance of a, . . . i8 
 Heaven, Louise P. An Idol of 
 
 Bronze 20 
 
 Herman, H. The Sword of Fate, . ig 
 
 Hewitt, E. Prettiness of Fools, . . 14 
 
 Hypocrite, The. (Anonymous), . . 21 
 Hypocrite, The. (Author of "Miss 
 
 Malevolent") ai 
 
 Hypocrite, The. (Author of " From 
 
 the Book Beautiful "), ... 7 
 Hypocrite, The. (Author of " His 
 
 Grace's Grace "), .... 13 
 Hypocrite, The. (Author of "The 
 
 Cigarette Smoker "), . . . .25 
 
 Ideal Physical Culture. (Apollo), 7 
 
 Idealist, The. Grove Johnson), . . 18 
 
 Idol of Bronze. (L. P. Heaven), . 20 
 
 In Monte Carlo. (H. Sienkiewicz), . 22 
 
 In the World of Mimes. (L. Melville), 15 
 In Quaint East Anglia. (T. W. 
 
 Carnie)» .•,... 8 
 
 Ira Lorraine. (Coralie Fevez), . . 16 
 
 Irving, Washington. Rip Van Winkle, lo 
 
 John Basileon. {See "My Lady 
 
 Ruby") 22 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Rasselas, . . .10 
 
 Johnson, Grove. The Idealist, . . 18 
 
 Kelly, W. P. The Dolomite Cavern, 20 
 
 Kennedy, Bart. A Man Adrift, . . 8 
 
 Kennedy, Bart. Darab's Wine-Cup, . 22 
 Kennedy, Bart. The Wandering 
 
 Romanoff, ..... 23 
 
 Lady of Criswold, The. (L. Outram), 24 
 Lady of the Leopard, The. (C. 
 
 L'Epine), .... .20 
 
 Le Sage. Asmodeus, . . . .11 
 
 Leno, D. Dan Leno, Hys Booke, . 28 
 
 L'Epine, C. The Devil in a Domino, 25 
 
 L'Epine, C. The Lady of the Leopard, 20 
 
 Leyken. N. Where the Oranges Grow, 13 
 Lizars, K. and R. Committed to His 
 
 Charge 13 
 
 Longstaff, W. L. Weeds and Flowers, 9 
 Longstaff, W. L. The Tragedy of the 
 
 Lady Palmist, 21 
 
 London. (J. W. Cundall), . . . 29 
 Loughnan, J. Pym. Mad ? . .23 
 Love Thirst of Elaine, The. (J. 
 
 Hannaford), 20 
 
 Lord Jimmy. (G. Martyn), , . 23 
 
 Mad ? (J. 'Pym Loughnan), . . 23 
 Madonna Mia. C. Scott), . . .20 
 
 Man Adrift, A. (B. Kennedy), . . 8 
 Magnetism of Sin, The. (" •'Escula- 
 
 pius") 14 
 
 Maori War, The. (Lt. -Col. E.Gorton), 6 
 
 Martin, E. Shadows, .... 26 
 Martyn, G. Lord Jimmy, . . .23 
 
 MayneReid, Captain. (MrsM. Reid), 4 
 
 M'Millan,A. The Weird Well, . 16 
 Messiahship of Shakspeare, The. 
 
 (Clelia), 4 
 
 Merim^e, P. Colomba, . . .11 
 
 Melville, L. In the World of Mimes, 15 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 32 
 
 Greening & Co., Ltd., Publishers 
 
 (Author of 
 
 PAGE 
 
 'The 
 
 Miss Malevolent 
 
 Hypocrite"), 
 Milecete, H. A Girl of the North, 
 Milecete, H. A Detached Pirate, . 13 
 Mora. (T. W. Speight), _ . . .15 
 Moore, Thomas. The Epicurean, 
 Modern Argonauts, The. (Eliza 
 
 Orzeszko), 12 
 
 Monkshood, G. F. Rudyard Kipling, i 
 Monkshood, G. F. My Lady Ruby, 22 
 Monkshood, G. F, Woman and the 
 
 Wits, 9 
 
 My Lady Ruby. (G. F. Monkshood), 22 
 Nebo. (A. J. Ferreira), ... 7 
 Nonsense Numbers and Jocular 
 
 Jingles. (Druid Grayl), . . .27 
 Northern Lights and Shadows. (R. 
 
 G. Taber), . . _ . . .5 
 Nursery Rhymes, A History of. (P, 
 
 B. Green), 8 
 
 Obscure Apostle, An. (Madame 
 
 Orzeszko), 12 
 
 Orzeszko, Madame. The Modern 
 
 Argonauts, 12 
 
 Orzeszko, Madame. An Obscure 
 
 Apostle, 12 
 
 Our Lady of the Ice. (Constance 
 
 Sutcliffe), 20 
 
 Outrageous Fortune. (AnonjTnous), . 19 
 Outram, L. The Lady of Criswold, . 24 
 Owen, J. L. Seven Nights with Satan, ig 
 
 Path of the Soul, The. (De 
 
 Soissons), 
 Patriotism or Self- Advertisement ? 
 
 (Marie Corelli), 
 Pemberton, T. E. Bret Harte, . 
 
 Pelican Tails. (F. M. Boyd), . . 25 
 
 Physical Culture, Ideal. (Apollo), . 7 
 
 Pillypingle Pastorals. (Druid Grayl), 28 
 
 Pottle Papers. (T. Coutt.s), . . 28 
 
 Poster, A Book of the. (W. S. Rogers), 5 
 
 Power ofthe Past, The. (Daisy Pryce), 14 
 Power-Berrey, R. J. Bye-Ways of 
 
 Crime, 6 
 
 Prettiness of Fools, The. (E. Hewitt), 14 
 
 Pyke, R. The Fellow-Passengers, . 26 
 Pryce, Daisy Hughes. The Power of 
 
 the Past t4 
 
 Rae-Brown, C. The Shadow on the 
 
 Manse, 17 
 
 Rae-Brown, C. The Resurrection of 
 
 His Grace, 24 
 
 Rasselas. (Dr Johnson), . . . 10 
 
 Reade, C. The After-Taste, . . 14 
 Red Fate. (E. Forbes), . . .13 
 Resurrection of His Grace, The. 
 
 (Rae-Brown) 24 
 
 Ringan Gilhaize. (J. Gait), . . 10 
 Rip Van Winkle. (W. Irving), to and 26 
 
 Rogers, W. S. A Book of the Poster, s 
 Romance of a Harem, . . .18 
 
 Sadleir, Mrs. An Uncanny Girl, . 25 
 
 Sadleir, Mrs. Such is the Law, . 16 
 
 Salathiel. (Dr Croly), . . .11 
 
 Sapho. (D.iudet), . . . . 18 
 
 Scott, C. The Wheel of Life, . . 3 
 
 Scott, C. Madonna Mia, . . . 20 
 
 Scott, C. Some Notable Hamlets, . 3 
 
 Scott, C. Sisters by the Sea, . . 4 
 
 Seed, Rev. T. A. Woman, . . 5 
 Seekers of Sentiment, . . . .14 
 Seven Nights with Satan. (J. L. 
 
 Owen), 19 
 
 Shadow on the Manse, The. (Rae- 
 Brown), 17 
 
 Shadows. (E. Martin), . . .26 
 Shams I (Anonymous), . . .18 
 Sienkiewicz, H. In Monte Carlo, . 22 
 Social Upheaval, A. (I. G. Ascher), 17 
 Son of Africa, A. (De Brimont), . 15 
 Speight, T. W. Mora, . _ . _ . 15 
 Speight, T. W. Two Days in a Life- 
 time, 15 
 
 Speight, T. W. For Himself Alone, . 15 
 
 Spurr, H. Bachelor Ballads, . . 29 
 Stage, The Year Book of the. (L. A, 
 
 Greening), . . _ . . .7 
 
 Such is the Law. (Sadleir, Mrs), . 16 
 Sutcliffe, Constance. Our Lady of 
 
 the Ice, 20 
 
 Sword of Fate, The. (H. Herman), . 19 
 
 Taber, R. G. Northern Lights and 
 
 Shadows, s 
 
 Thais. (Anatole France), . . .18 
 That Fascinating Widow. (S. J. A. 
 
 Fitz-Gerald) 26 
 
 Thompson, C. J. S. Zoroastro, . . 18 
 Tragedy of Grub Street, A. (S. J. 
 
 Adair Fitz-Gerald), . . . • »3 
 Tragedy of a Pedigree, The. (Hugo 
 
 Ames), . . . . _ . .13 
 Tragedy of the Lady Palmist, The. 
 
 (W. L. LongstaflO 21 
 
 Trip to Paradoxia, A^ (T. H. Escott), 6 
 
 Two Days in a Life-time. (T. Speight), 15 
 
 Turner, R. Cynthia's Damages, . 15 
 
 Uncanny Girl, An. (Mrs Sadleir), . 25 
 Upperton, R. Village Life and 
 
 Feeling, 10 
 
 Vagabond in Asia, A. (E. Candler), 4 
 Vathek. (W. Beckford), . _ . .11 
 
 Vert, A. P. The Green Passion, . 19 
 Village Life and Feeling. (Rupert 
 
 Uppington) 10 
 
 Virtue of Necessity, A. (H. Adams), 17 
 
 Wandering Romanoff, The. (Bart 
 
 Kennedy), 23 
 
 Weeds jmd Flowers. (W. Longstaflf), 9 
 
 Weird Well, The. (Alec M'Millan), . 16 
 
 Wheel of Life, The. (C. Scott), • 3 
 Where the Oranges Grow. (N. A. 
 
 Leyken), 13 
 
 Williams, Ernest E. An Exile in 
 
 Bohemia, 12 
 
 Williams, Ellen. Anna Marsden's 
 
 Experiment, 24 
 
 Woman. (Rev. T. A. Seed and A. 
 
 Fouill(^e), ...... 5 
 
 Woman and the Wits. (G. Monkshood), 9 
 Wratislaw, T. Algernon Charles 
 
 Swinbiu-ne 2 
 
 Year Book of the Stage, The. 
 
 (L. A. Greening) 7 
 
 Zola, E. A Dead Woman's Vow, , 18 
 
 Zoroastro. (C. J. Thompson), . . i8 
 
 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.
 
 iT^ 
 
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