like an astrologer, all these types and yet others have been practised; but Meredith has kept tranquilly on the tenor of his large way, uninfluenced, except as he has expressed all these complexities in his own work.  He is in literary evolution, a sport.  Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt.  He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature.  He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought.  What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, “Modern Love”?  And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example of the New Woman of our day—­socially, economically, intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive feminine quality?  And yet, in “The Shaving of Shagpat,” an early work, we go back t the Arabian Nights for a model.  The satiric romance, “Harry Richmond,” often reminds of the leisured episode method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique “Evan Harrington” we think at times of Aristophanes.

Nor is much light thrown on Meredith’s path in turning to his personal history.  Little is known of this author’s ancestry and education; his environment has been so simple, his life in its exteriors so uneventful, that we return to the work itself with the feeling that the key to the secret room must be here if anywhere.  It is known that he was educated in youth in Germany, which is interesting in reference to the problem of his style.  And there is more to be said concerning his parentage than the smug propriety of print has revealed while he lived.  We know, too, that his marriage with the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock proved unhappy, and that for many years he has resided, almost a recluse, with his daughter, in the idyllic retirement of Surrey.  The privacy of Boxhill has been respected; next to never has Meredith spoken in any public way and seldom visited London.  When he was, at Tennyson’s death, made the President of the British Society of Authors, the honor sought the man.  The rest is silence; what has appeared since his death has been of too conflicting a nature for credence.  We await a trustworthy biography.

The appeal then must be to the books themselves.  Exclusive of short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of generous girth—­for Meredith is old-fashioned in his demand for elbow-room.  They are preeminently novels of character and more than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in them is that of the intellect.  This does not mean that they are wanting in emotional force or interest:  merely, that in George Meredith’s fiction men and women live the life of thought as it is acted upon by practical issues.  Character seen in action is always his prepossession; plot is naught save as it exhibits this.  The souls of men and