than that of a noble death, I take it that
Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative,
inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and
the potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely heightened and
strengthened thereby.

The Tragic Comedians.

Opinions differ, and there are those, I believe, to whom Alvan and
Clotilde von Rudiger--'acrobats of the affections' they have been
called--are pleasant companions, and the story of those feats in the
gymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is the
prettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to be
plain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, and
the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings--not of the
stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy
Feverel and Richmond Roy--but creatures of gossamer and rainbow,
phantasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiriting
points in sexual philosophy.

The Egoist.

Just as Moliere in the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and
embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false
fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby
Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism
as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception
and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men
there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief,
exquisite, lucid: classic in his union of ease and strength, of purity
and sufficiency, of austerity and charm. In _The Egoist_ Mr. Meredith is
even more artificial and affected than his wont: he bristles with
allusions, he teems with hints and side-hits and false alarms, he
glitters with phrases, he riots in intellectual points and philosophical
fancies; and though his style does nowhere else become him so well, his
cleverness is yet so reckless and indomitable as to be almost as
fatiguing here as everywhere. But in their matter the great Frenchman
and he have not much to envy each other. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a
'document on humanity' of the highest value; and to him that would know
of egoism and the egoist the study of Sir Willoughby is indispensable.
There is something in him of us all. He is a compendium of the Personal
in man; and if in him the abstract Egoist have not taken on his fina