Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate is concerned: but always a poet at heart (he began with verse), he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity, so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so pathetic in its doom. There is something noble always in the tragic largeness of Hardy's best fiction. His grim determinism is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome, he is consoled by contact with "the pure, eternal course of things"; whose august flow comforts Arnold. Because of his art, the representative character of his thought, reflecting in prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius, Thomas Hardy is sure to hold his place in the English fiction of the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of the few to be recognized and honored abroad. No writer of fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice of subject. If his convictions have led him to excess, they will be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English literature. II Once in a while--a century or so, maybe,--comes an artist who refuses to be classified. Rules fail to explain him: he makes new rules in the end. He seems too big for any formula. He impresses by the might of his personality, teaching the world what it should have known before, that the personal is the life-blood of all and any art. Some such effect is made upon the critic by George Meredith, who so recently has closed his eyes to the shows of earth. One can find in him almost all the tendencies of English fiction. He is realist and romanticist, frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and above all, Poet. Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn: he puts on when he will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the elect. And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that it is more than worth the pains. Perhaps the lesson of it all is that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, is a phenomenon transcending school, movement or period. George Meredith is not, if we weigh words, the greatest English novelist to-day--for both Hardy and Stevenson are his superiors as artists; but he is the greatest man who has written fiction.