he has the comic as well; he is an ardent student of
character and life; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive,
the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or human
at his pleasure; he has passion and he has imagination; he has considered
sex--the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art--with notable
audacity and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion
as he is of managing an affectation. He can be trivial, or grotesque, or
satirical, or splendid; and whether his _milieu_ be romantic or actual,
whether his personages be heroic or sordid, he goes about his task with
the same assurance and intelligence. In his best work he takes rank with
the world's novelists. He is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an
intimate for Fielding and Cervantes. His figures fall into their place
beside the greatest of their kind; and when you think of Lucy Feverel and
Mrs. Berry, of Evan Harrington's Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotte
of _Emilia in England_, of the two old men in _Harry Richmond_ and the
Sir Everard Romfrey of _Beauchamp's Career_, of Renee and Cecilia, of
Emilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and Ripton
Thompson, they have in the mind's eye a value scarce inferior to that of
Clarissa and Lovelace, of Bath and Western and Booth, of Andrew
Fairservice and Elspeth Mucklebacket, of Philippe Bridau and Vautrin and
Balthasar Claes. In the world of man's creation his people are citizens
to match the noblest; they are of the aristocracy of the imagination, the
peers in their own right of the society of romance. And for all that,
their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn.

His Defects.

For Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great
writers as well as one of the best and most fascinating. He is a sun
that has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of his
genius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes with
the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual
suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous
cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him
to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As
Shakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was
content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the
sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and b