I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith. Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and America and the Continent. But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it. Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where had he been born? The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace. So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with him and never spoke of him. What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an English gentleman. And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the privileges of the caste--to ridicule other members who fall away from the perfect caste ideal.