re of genteel imposture. His lordly practice of never
sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of
his trade. In _Evan Harrington_ three generations of a family's shame were
held up to ridicule. No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was
congratulated by a customer on his son's fame, turned away silently with a
look of pain.

The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact
that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. Whether
Meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their
pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. Both _Evan Harrington_ and
_Harry Richmond_ are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the
vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Moliere lashes the vice of
hypocrisy in _Tartuffe_. But it may well be that in life Meredith was a
snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his last book
of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art
not his "self" (which is expressed in his life), but his "anti-self," a
complementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and works
of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was
an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious in
his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of the
wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his
books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his
books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more
thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other
English novelist has ever done.

He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. In _Modern
Love_ and _Richard Feverel_ he reveals himself as by no means a laughing
philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic
laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great
poetic imagination is always at work--in his prose, perhaps, even more
than in his verse--his genius might seem a little cold and
head-in-the-air. But his poet's joy in his characters saves his books from
inhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere
female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and
the light of morning and the coming of the flowers. Meredith had as great
a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressed
in literat