This is the philosophy that ‘Richard Feverel’ exposes--conjectural, questioning; a drawn game between reason and impulse, between nature and intellect, between a philosopher’s system and a young man’s first love. Neither win, because, though a mighty fighter and a Homeric wrestler with words, Meredith is not of the definite school, and will not pander to his readers’ tastes either way. Are you for the mismanaged poor hero, or for the disappointed philosopher, gazing in the last page upon the system fondly built upon sand, and laid in ruins by the first breath of purely human disaster? Mr. Meredith resolves that your sympathies shall be balanced, as his own are soundly balanced. He leaves you with a question upon your lips, and your childish reproach is chidden by his silence. Richard is the strongest and best hero the writer has drawn, before he fell in love with the more intricate complexities of woman, and delighted in her intellectual surprises, her social difficulties and struggles with iron fate and masculinity. We part with him as he rises from a sick-bed, widowed and broken upon the outset of brilliant manhood, enshadowed in a tragic gloom, and who is to explain to us the evolution of middle-age in this youth of burning hope and rash promise? Not the creator, certainly. The throes of commonplace speculation into which he may thrust the ordinary reader trouble him not, and he is less merciful to him even than Tolstoi. He takes us from that strong Shakespearean scene, in which Richard reads the diary of Clare Doria Forey, unveiling her unconscious and reticent love, only fully measured by her on the threshold of a loveless marriage, while overhead the candles are burning in her mortuary chamber, and flickering lugubriously upon the lips that have spoken to him from ‘behind the hills of death’; and without giving us time to clear our throats of the gathered sensations of pity and pain, he hurls us into fresh emotions, equally painful, by the death of Lucy, Richard’s young wife. And after that we learn nothing more of Richard, and are at liberty to decide for ourselves whether Sir Austin, the broker system-creator, and Lady Blandish married, like any other pair of middle-aged lovers, or preferred to continue in the less definite and secure path of platonic sentimentalities--the one studying the pilgrim’s scrip, the other adding to its wisdom.