GEORGE MEREDITH.
George Meredith, Novelist, Poet, Reformer. By M. Sturge Henderson. (Methuen and Co. Os.)—This is one of the most serious of the many serious books which the Meredith worship of the last ten years has produced. If it errs at all, it errs in exaggerating Meredith's own weakness of placing too much stress upon the philosophy and too little upon the humour as distinguished from the comedy of life. This will be obvious to any one who considers the meaning of such a deliverance as the following ;—" Intermittently Meredith is a great artist ; primarily and consistently he is a moralist—a teacher. He has pondered on man and his destiny till his insight has perceived whole regions and vistas of human possibility that as yet are untenanted, and he has made it the object of his existence to nerve his fellows to seize and enter on the fulness of their inheritance His poems and novels are glossaries on his reading of life, and for Meredith every department of life is teeming with import." Undoubtedly this volume is most valuable for the detailed and minutely introspective criticism which it contains of each of Mr. Meredith's great works, including his poetry, the chapters dealing with which, however, Mr. Henderson
informs us, are not his own work, but that of his friend Mr. Basil de Selincourt. The quality of Mr. Henderson's discrimina- tion may be gathered from his judgment on "Rhoda Fleming," regarding which, speaking from the philosophical point of view, he says :-" One of Our Conquerors,' with all its subtlety and beauty, sinks by the side of 'Rhoda Fleming' to little more than a tractate." Altogether, no book on Mr. Meredith which has been published recently can be said to be more possessed by the " spirit of the Master."
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