Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himself is all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and his grandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him; they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career, determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith's thought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how it makes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man through whom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes, successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, complete in the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredith saw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it is there to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions, and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whose circumstances are such as to give him very free play and to test and prove him very effectually--there is the burden of Meredith's saga, as I call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainly pushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. The romance of the blood-royal, for instance--it would be hard to argue that the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, and all the pervading thrill that Meredith gets from it; Richmond Roy is largely gratuitous, a piece of indulgence on Meredith's part. But that objection is not likely to be pressed very severely, and anyhow Harry is firmly established in the forefront. He tells his story, he describes the company and the scenes he has lived through; and all the time it is by them that he is himself described.