his place in the English fiction of the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of the few to be recognized and honored abroad.  No writer of fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice of subject.  If his convictions have led him to excess, they will be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English literature.

II

Once in a while—­a century or so, maybe,—­comes an artist who refuses to be classified.  Rules fail to explain him:  he makes new rules in the end.  He seems too big for any formula.  He impresses by the might of his personality, teaching the world what it should have known before, that the personal is the life-blood of all and any art.  Some such effect is made upon the critic by George Meredith, who so recently has closed his eyes to the shows of earth.  One can find in him almost all the tendencies of English fiction.  He is realist and romanticist, frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and above all, Poet.  Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn:  he puts on when he will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the elect.  And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that it is more than worth the pains.  Perhaps the lesson of it all is that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, is a phenomenon transcending school, movement or period.  George Meredith is not, if we weigh words, the greatest English novelist to-day—­for both Hardy and Stevenson are his superiors as artists; but he is the greatest man who has written fiction.

Although he was alive but yesterday, the novel frequently awarded first position among his works, “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” was published a good half century ago.  Go back to it, get its meaning, then read the latest fiction he wrote—­(he ceased to produce fiction more than a decade before his death) and you appear to be in contact with the same personality in the substantials of story-making and of life-view.  The only notable change is to be found in the final group of three stories, “One of Our Conquerors,” “Lord Ormont and His Aminta” and “The Amazing Marriage.”  The note of social protest is louder here, the revolt against conventions more pronounced.  Otherwise, the author of “Feverel” is the author of “The Amazing Marriage.”  Much has occurred in the Novel during the forty years between the two works:  realism has traveled to an extreme, neo-idealism come by way of reaction, romanticism bloomed again, the Novel of ingenious construction, the Novel of humanitarian meaning, the Novel of thesis and problem and the Novel that foretells the future