IF the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his generation the companion of poetry, and thus the secong great imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony, the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion--the works of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë--works of geniuses as they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.

George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge of the human heart as though knowledge in itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used his sympathy. He worked much beyond and far above the regions in which the wrangle about art with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward. No critic will ever impugn Meredith's transcendent purpose. It is not possible to imagine his prose or poetry without it.

The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable even in the eyes of those who think it incomplete. Great he was--in though, in passion, in the art of letters, a student of mankind who sought to help, without consoling, the race he watched, suffering and hoping with that which he studied, as a physician pressing a finger upon a brother's wrist, caring much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man's life, caring also much for his own science. The incompleteness which so many readers charged against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great and high repose of art which is unconscious of appearances. A great author should be anxious for effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appearances or the result of his phrase upon the untaught. Meredith's prose has not this loftiness, and therefore misses the classic simplicity. He must be afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights, and Meredith feared commonplace. Strange fear for so distinguished a mind! But the fear is unmistakable. It appears most plainly in narrative. He will not consent to employ the usual forthright order of words in telling what happened. Even in recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly bear to use the customary 'he said'--he prefers 'she heard'. This perpetual kind of device mars the manner of his work only in so far as a fine style can be marred by a little manner, and that is not very far. Generally when we find such a weakness of fear and human respect in literature, it is the companion of a weakness of the whole man--or at any rate of the whole author. But when a great man suffers from this frailty, we gladly recognize the truth that style is a profound thing that cannot gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith's style is at the foundation of his literature. It has often been said of some author that he has little intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnificent style, yet writes but ill, wild as the paradox may sound. Everything worthy to be called style is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked and bent. No other man's writing could keep its strength, its gravity, and its beauty under such a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind or another is, by a long convention, in its right home, Meredith's fault of manner is the use of words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs in none but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining to the full meaning is too great in both the earlier and later poems, and in the slighter pieces the fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagination is Meredith's, but a quibbling fancy.

When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, the phrase was taken away from the novel, to which it should belong. Philosophic novelists (there have not been many in the history of English letters) are the chief critics of human life--social life, civilized life, the life of the race and of races, and that of a man and a woman; even a great novelist who is not a philosopher--Thackeray, for example--is a critic of life in its ethics, its emotions, and its shows; the novelist who is a humorist does his admirable part of criticism. But Meredith in his day took the whole social man into his grasp and his vision. A mere user of his arresting hand and of his searching eyes Meredith was not; he bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a human heart upon the study of character. The study was also the creation. Meredith formed the most possible, the most complex, the most complete and least explicable of women and men, now and then varying these vitally-mingled persons by presenting a man who, having one quality only, such as the Egoism of the Egoist, is yet alive with a most indubitable life. George Meredith seldom tells a story of these people--he tells nothing less than their history. What he tells us is so much their history that the error, the sin, or the blunder that draws their fate about them is detected in their youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early or late, in their doom. No other important student of life, except perhaps George Eliot, has found such visible revenges. He saw them, and he was resolved to show them. His doctrine of consequences seems to stand between that of the Buddhist with his inevitable body of results, and that of the Christian with his directed and decreed retribution. Meredith's Avenger is an offended Nature or wronged Reason, working by the force of some undecreed law; nevertheless of a law. Undecreed; and yet Meredith, by figure of language at any rate, attributeds to the visiting and avenging Power now something of formidable indignation and now something of formidable indifference; and even indifference has to be felt! Even blindness implies an eye capable of sight! Meredith had a philosophy of Nature which taught him not--as other students of brute life might suppose--a simple and irresponsible egoism, but self-denial, self-conquest, and unflinching endurance. He would have the individual man to learn the almost unlearnable lesson that his own fate is of no importance. Of no importance to the race others have perceived and pronounced it; Meredith would have the unit to accept and make his own that interior resignation--if resignation is not too half-hearted a word. All the graver poems too bear this as their principal teaching, and their many lessons rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this doctrine he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as his heart of tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no surer mission than to attack the outworks of that self-love within which lurks the condemned desire for personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared with which the courage of the Stoic is but shallow in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing in its wounding of the heart.

"George Meredith" is reprinted from The Second Person Singular and Other Essays. Alice Meynell. London: Oxford University Press, 1922.