and Jane, a victim
of love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious,
rose-enfolded, foreign." There are nearly three hundred pages of it
altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith
ever wrote.

As one reads _Celt and Saxon_, however, one seems to get an inkling of the
reason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. It is
not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of
explanation--a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, I
think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his
books. Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray's imagination.
The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks,
did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass
them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose
fiction.

It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they are
elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. Even
though he is at pains to tell us that Diana's hair is dark, we do not at
once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair
woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in
his vision of such matters. In the present book, again, we have a glimpse
of Adiante in her miniature--"this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes
and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself
thrilling," "the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines
and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the
eyes"--and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only
the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design.

Ultimately, these women of Meredith's become intensely real to us--the
most real women, I think, in English fiction--but, before we come to
handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and
rocky places with the sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they are
apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with
the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses.

Coming to the substance of the book--the glance from many sides at the
Irish and English temperaments--we find Meredith extremely penetrating in
his criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his
study of the Irish character. The son of an Irishwoman, he chose an
Irishwoman a