But if the tricks of the essayist and the playwright are freely borrowed by Meredith, sometimes to his disadvantage and to ours, they are nevertheless in a measure appropriate to the kind of fiction he affects. For Meredith is a psychological novelist. He is bent upon displaying the inward process of the mind. As Richard Le Galliene has said of him: "The passion of his genius is ... the tracing of the elemental in the complex; the registration of the infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hairbreadth measurement of subtle psychological tangents: and the embodiment of these results in artistic form." Meredith, in _Richard Feverel_, declares that for the novel "An audience will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work.... To them nothing will be trivial.... They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter came out of that small one." Certainly Meredith's efforts have tended to realize that time. But the psychology of his characters is general rather than individual. You are conscious that these minds are typical, or even symbolic. They belong to an imaginary and rational world treated as though it were real. An incidental passage in _Beauchamp's Career_ shows that Meredith has understood both his limitations and his peculiar ability. "My way," he writes, "is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive, and difficult between the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real which delight mankind--honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none! they are actual yet uncommon. It is the clockwork of the brain that they are directed to set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant benches!--the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them we are lost."