ly, there are the chivalrous
Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose
proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all
these are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from
difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it
is that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the two
sisters--Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner! Where else in English
fiction is such a 'human oak log' as their father, the Kentish yeoman
William Fleming? And where in English fiction is such a problem
presented as that in the evolution of which these three--with a following
so well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and Jonathan Eccles and
the evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and Master
Gammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of human
saurian--are dashed together, and ground against each other till the
weakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may and
does fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and Algernon
Blancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and he
makes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. With
these he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unity
of effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to great creative
art; and at their highest stress of emotion, the culmination of their
passion, they appeal to and affect you with a force and a directness that
suggest the highest achievement of Webster. Of course this sounds
excessive. The expression of human feeling in the coil of a tragic
situation is not a characteristic of modern fiction. It is thought to be
not consistent with the theory and practice of realism; and the average
novelist is afraid of it, the average reader is only affected by it when
he goes to look for it in poetry. But the book is there to show that
such praise is deserved; and they who doubt it have only to read the
chapters called respectively 'When the Night is Darkest' and 'Dahlia's
Frenzy' to be convinced and doubt no longer. It has been objected to the
climax of _Rhoda Fleming_ that it is unnecessarily inhumane, and that
Dahlia dead were better art than Dahlia living and incapable of love and
joy. But the book, as I have said, is a merciless impeachment of
respectability; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life is
infinitely more discomforting