nd heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits
well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the
youth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it
comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous,
informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer.
True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a
story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern
times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of
spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life--true that in so
far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's
books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp
and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the
century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the
nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the
machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of
appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that
is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a
series of adventures loosely connected--connected only by the fact
that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of
narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and
the young man shall speak for himself.

The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a
novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord,
or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity
by the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hang
together logically, artistically; but every part of it is at least
united with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to one
man. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore;
the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together and
stamp it after a fashion as a single whole. Does anybody dare to
suggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the method
among our novelists? Autobiography--it is a regular literary form, and
yet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literary
form; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charm
is in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of the
writer's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is not
expected to guide his thought in an ord