Here this subtle psychologist concerns himself neither with plot nor passion; neither with tragedy nor romance, nor with any of what may be called the passional springs of action and will. If ‘Richard Feverel’ was an original and bewildering canter along the highway of fiction, ‘The Egoist’ may be described as a breathless charge into the unknown, a direct and forcible challenge of the unsuspected. Here we see mercilessly unveiled civilized man, as he thinks and feels, in the person of a handsome young squire enjoying every advantage of nature, fortune and birth. Nothing in him courts rejection of our sympathies. He is not a villain, and he is a polished, perfect gentleman, well informed, well mannered, well groomed, and exceedingly well mounted for a more than spirited ride through the plains and over the hills of experience. Such a man as Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall, in command of a rent-roll of £20,000, the ordinary novelist, or even our old friends, the great Immortals, could only conceive as playing a successful and a triumphant part through life. Why, in fact, should punishment and humiliation of the lightest nature pursue a youth in whom no vicious taste, no fixed vice, is pronounced? And who but a dissector so utterly merciless as Mr. Meredith could find courage to drive his dissecting-knife straight to the heart of the conventional system, and qualify the unrevealed disease of this graceful ornament of county society by the ugly name of egoism? the malady of the Ego? Who else but this captain of woman could draw us maidens bold enough to read the man and reject him, in spite of the big social bribes he carries in his hand? Ah, this is Mr. Meredith’s great and original note, once he has relieved his youthful soul of the romance of ‘Richard Feverel.’ Woman is his study, especially young militant womanhood, and what a study he has made of her! Upon this theme not a single male writer, living or dead, since Shakespeare, can approach him, and to it he brings modern subtle penetration added to Shakespeare’s purely natural instinct. Not only has he caught the bloom and poetry of womanhood, and made her visible to us to the soul--this were the achievement of the poet and the artist of very exquisite perceptions; but he has got at the very root of her nature--quite another thing. Women reading him gasp at his revelations, such as they would never dare to make or dream, so completely hedged round are they by the conventionalities of fiction. When they take to writing stories, they either set themselves limitations in the portrayal of their female characters stricter than their brothers, or to hide their own ignorance of themselves (a mystery for us as much as for men) set off at a galloping pace into the realms of improbability.