Now Mr. Meredith avoids all anthropometric statistics and chemical analysis, and gives us the very counterfeit presentment of men and women as in actual life they go visibly and audibly past us; and yet he so seizes his moments for portraiture that the soul, the inner life, the character, photographs itself on the retina of a sensitive on-looker like a composite picture. He makes all his characters and scenes, and all the life he portrays, instinct with truth; and yet this truth is implicit; the author very rarely indulges in pretentious talk on these topics. For the most part, he is apparently busy putting before us the picturesque aspects of life and its dramatic moments. This fondness of his for brilliance of surface, for vividness of portrayal, accounts for many peculiarities of Mr. Meredith’s method,—among them for the use of what may be termed _Meredith mosaic_. His opening chapters are nearly always curious composites, made up of dozens of little speeches, little acts, little scenes, collected from a series of years, and fitted together into a more or less homogeneous whole. He dislikes formal exposition; he instinctively shrinks from discoursing through wearisome pages on the early lives of the actors in his story, on the formative influences, for example, which had moulded the characters of Aminta and Weyburn up to the moment when the continuous action of “Lord Ormont” begins. Yet the “fuller portraiture” requires that this knowledge be in some way ensured to his readers. Hence he puts before us such skilfully chosen bits of Aminta’s and Weyburn’s early lives, that while our imaginations are always kept busy with words and tones and acts and looks, we are at the same time inveigled into a knowledge of minds and hearts and motives. Chapters constructed on this plan are curiously without continuity of action, and often seem puzzling in their fragmentariness. But they combine, in an unusual degree, vividness of portrayal with suggestiveness of interpretation. Another means by which Mr. Meredith secures his brilliance of surface, his glowing color, is through his lavish use of figures. Mr. Meredith is a poet subdued by the spirit of his age to work in its most popular form, the novel; but even in prose his imagination will not be gainsaid, and everywhere we find in his style the sensuous concreteness and symbolism of poetry. “Absent or present, she was round him like the hills of a valley. She was round his thoughts—caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were conscious of her.” . . . “Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of sea where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.” In no other contemporary English fiction do we come upon passages like these, and realize with a sudden pang of delight that we are in the region of poetry where imaginative beauty is an end in itself.