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 women are his quarry, and the test of
a civilization the degree in which it has developed the mind for
an enlightened control over the emotions and the bodily
appetites. Neither does this mean, as with Henry James, the
disappearance of plot: a healthy objectivity of narrative
framework is preserved; if anything the earlier
books--"Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming" and the duo
"Sandra Belloni" and "Vittoria"--have more of story interest
than the later novels. Meredith has never feared the use of the
episode, in this suggesting the older methods of Fielding and
Smollett. Yet the episodic in his hands has ever its use for
psychologic envisagement. Love, too, plays a large role in his
fiction; indeed, in the wider platonic sense, it is constantly
present, although he is the last man to be called a writer of
love-stories. And no man has permitted himself greater freedom
in stepping outside the story in order to explain his meaning,
comment upon character and scene, rhapsodize upon Life, or
directly harangue the reader. And this broad marginal
reservation of space, however much it is deplored in viewing his
work as novel-making, adds a peculiar tonic and is a
characteristic we could ill spare. It brings us back to the
fee