Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean is that this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by which caste superiority is manifested and maintained--this is the stuff out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which his superfine intellect would be concentrated. And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it; you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed.