"The comic spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech." On the stage, the great master of such comedy is Moliere, and in the novel, we might add, Meredith. Meredith's confession of faith in the efficacy of the comic spirit is given in the prelude to _The Egoist_, and in these words of his famous _Essay_: "If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense, you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead.... It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips.... Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation.... Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown...; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit,... the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit." Unquestionably it is by the aid of this spirit that Meredith writes his novels, even including such a tragedy from the victim's point of view as _Richard Feverel_. For Meredith is theoretic or nothing. Conceiving of a folly to be displayed and made ridiculous, he invents persons and situations best to accomplish his purpose. He is, therefore, no mere realist examining the confused detail of actual life "by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal." He is rather an idealist, who holds it to be the business of art to render life in quintessence. The artist must both simplify and elaborate. First, he must simplify experience into typical deeds and persons, eliminating from his scheme the merely accidental and particular. Second, he must elaborate his simplification, presenting it through representative concrete instances that it may lose the aspect of an abstract formula and acquire emotional significance. Meredith is thus an intellectualist engaged in playing a game of literary chess. He has made the pattern on his board and designed the pieces, and he moves them according to a pre-arranged plan. Just as his Sir Austin seeks to enact the role of Providence in determining the career of Richard Feverel, so Meredith plays Providence to his personages, and, more than most novelists, he visibly controls their fate.