But there is much else in the novels of this remarkable writer besides music and poetry, and the soft showery joys and sorrows of young love. There are the qualities and deficiencies of his tragic and his mighty side as a pendant for the grace and charm of the mood we have seen. Everything in him is pronounced. He has a taste for strong lights and shadows, for grotesque asides and interruptions; is sometimes crude, always complex, and often incomplete. His coarseness is akin to the coarseness that shakes us to amazement in the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, where ribaldry and lovely delicacy go hand-in-hand; where, swift upon the most fanciful play of thought and scenes of pathetic beauty, and images as exquisite as a Theocritan idyl, come a burst of clownish mirth and hideous joking. Shakespearean is the word to describe Meredith, both in his defects and in his qualities. In each is he great, with something of the unapproachable greatness, the originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over his. Human to the heels, a seer and a psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, no character lightly drawn. He delights in humanity, and almost wickedly revels in its eccentricities. Hence his tendency to exaggeration. He seizes a queer character, such as old Tom Cogglesby, John Raikes, or Mrs. Berry, and, not content with their natural oddities, like Dickens, he must steep them in the colours of his own imagination; with the result that they come out of the process caricatures, and we find it exceedingly hard to divest them of their comic garb, and trace them back to the elemental, whence they started on their devious wanderings through their creator’s mind. This characteristic, as M. Taine observes, is peculiarly English. Since Rabelais’ days the French writers are too hampered by laws and rules in art, inalterable, like those of the Medes and Persians, to dare play such tricks with reality and human nature as Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith, in their jesting moods, permit themselves. Scott’s moods had no such promptings, perhaps because he was a better story-teller than any of the three, and found the humour of life quite sufficient without the aid of exaggeration. But then there was no satire or hardness in all Scott’s nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy were his predominant traits. He wrote stories for the pleasure of writing them, not to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, in which he kept his faith green and unquestioning as a child’s.