. He once explained Rossetti's indifference
to politics by saying that he supposed "it needs a person of hopeful mind
to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not
hopeful." Morris was the very illuminator of hope. He was as hopeful a man
as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent
splendours of the Golden Age.

XVI.--GEORGE MEREDITH

(1) THE EGOIST

George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a
vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a
matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position
from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his
attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden.
Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for a
walk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in
restful veneration of "a god and a Greek." Mr. Ellis invites us--and we
cannot refuse the invitation--to look at the other side of the face, to
consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel
Meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can
continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a
human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius
for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily
at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that
prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next
with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full
story of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the
feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one
can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us
but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than
that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries--let us begin
to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one
of the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back
among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new
passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human
being who wrote them.

For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he could
not have written _The Egoist_ or _Harry Richmond_. He was an egoist