I learn, on very good authority, that Meredith has but a poor comparative opinion of his earlier work, and that he would dissent rather strongly from the critic who pronounced ‘The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’ his masterpiece. Yet it seems to me to be so, and in one particular it takes high rank indeed. It is remarkable that whilst love-making is so essential a part of the general human business, and whilst no novel or play which ignores it stands much chance of success, there are only two or three really virile presentations in fiction of ‘the way of a man with a maid.’ Shakspere gave us one in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but then Shakspere gave us everything. Charles Reade, in ‘Hard Cash,’ has shown us a pure girl growing into pure passion--a bit of truth and beauty which alone might make a sterling and enduring name for him. And Meredith in ‘Feverel’ has given us scenes of young courtship which are beyond the praises of a writer like myself. The two young people on their magic island are amongst the real-ideal figures which haunt my mind with sweetness. Nature on either side is virginal. It flames and trembles with natural passion both in boy and girl, and they are as pure as a pair of daisies. Any workman in the school of Namby-Pamby could have kept their purity. Any writer of the Roman-candle-volcanic tribe could have heaped up their fires, after a fashion. But for this special piece of work God had first to make a gentleman, and then to give him genius. One peculiarity in Meredith is worthy of notice. He makes known to us the interior personality of his characters; he does this so completely that we are persuaded that we could predict their line of conduct in given circumstances; and then a set of circumstances occur in which they do something we should never have believed of them, and we have to confess that their maker is just and right, and that there is no disputing him. There are inconsistencies in his pages more glaring than anything we can imagine outside real life. The average artist, dealing with these manifestations, is a spectacle for pity, as the average man would be on Blondin’s tight rope. The faintest deviation, the most momentary uncertainty of footing, a doubt, even, and it is all over. But Meredith never falters. He proves the impossible true by the mere fact of recording it. He has no cranks or crazes or ‘isms. He sees human nature with an eye which is at once broad and microscopic. What seem the very faults of style are virtues pushed to an extreme. He says more in a page than most men can say in a chapter. Modern science can put the nutritive properties of a whole ox into a very modest canister. Meredith’s best sentences have gone through just such a digestive process. He is not for everybody’s table, but he is a pride and a delight to the pick of English epicures.