When Diana of the Cross-Ways resists Percy's temptings and is led by her hatred of his evil to betray his secret, she chooses for her own happiness in the end. The storms through which she goes to reach it are the natural result of her impulsive, unbalanced mind. Stronger still is the teaching in 'The Tragic Comedians.' When Clotilde chooses the craven's part to play, she chooses also the craven's reward. It is in his scientific insight into moral life that Meredith's growth beyond Beowulf, Shakespeare, and even Browning appears. We of the nineteenth century would be sorry to think that we had not one master who goes even deeper into our modern life than these. We believe that, as men of the later twentieth century look back upon our day, they will call George Meredith our greatest literary exponent. Beowulf asserts the general truth that Circumstance and Character determine Destiny. Shakespeare has not gone very much farther in the philosophy of life. He teaches that character determines character, and that circumstance determines circumstance; and that, in some way, circumstance obeys character. Browning would advance a step and teach us, as his age taught the world, that the dependence of the external upon the spiritual comes about through the agency of a personal God. But Meredith takes up the cry of our scientific age, and says: "The god of this world is in the machine, not out of it." This is no irreverent teaching, for Meredith is not irreverent. It is simply the search for primary causes. It is the result of the same tendency that leads us to be dissatisfied with calling typhoid fever a "dispensation of Providence," and to lay it to bad drains. Like evolution in the physical world, this theory does not tend to remove God, but to explain more fully his agency and methods. It is no new theory. But the manner of its teaching is as new as this latter nineteenth century of ours. If one were to compare Meredith with Shakespeare on this subject, one would naturally coordinate Macbeth and Rhoda Fleming, Diana of the Cross-Ways and King Lear. 'Rhoda Fleming' is, like 'Macbeth,' a tale with a moral purpose. The dependence of fate on the moral choice is its chief thought. The book gains force, as all these novels do, from its striking characterizations. We see Dahlia, the fair-haired one, whose great failing is weakness,--the fault of a negative character. And we see plainly the long process of pain to which she thereby subjects herself in the course of her purification. Rhoda, her sister has, on the other hand, the defects of the positive character. She is head-strong, over-proud. It is from these characteristics that she suffers or leads others to suffer. "The Fates that mould us, always work from the main-spring."