always wise. The ingenious arabesque of thought is frequently not justified by subordination to a purpose; the coruscation of fanciful imagery lends no elucidating light. But how different is it with his humour of view, the humour that belongs to his mental attitude, his outlook over life, the humour that is of the essence of his genius. See it at work in the creation of a character, even of secondary importance, like Colonel de Craye, or Mrs. Berry, or Lord Romney, a gentleman whose character it was to foresee most human events.' See it in the lambent irony which pervades and leavens his books. What an extraordinary breadth of humorous appreciation of life is his!-now he calls for jeering Aristophanic laughter, now it is the humour of pathetic situations, now of the great and now of the little incongruities of life that move him. It is in the breadth of his humour and in the breadth of his characterisation that Mr. Meredith's greatness consists; in his intellectual penetration and his imaginative range. His method involves revelation of character by analysis, but analysis conducted while his personages pass through the fire of some crucial position, or are subjected to the shock of circumstance, as of Beauchamp tested amid the conflict of party politics, or Emilia drawn at once by love of country and passion for her lover.

And that the only fatality is the fatality of character is a truth driven home in all Mr. Meredith's greater novels. Thus is his tragedy human, and thus it comes that it is not depressing. Human life is never represented in his novels as tragic, because an iron necessity drives man whither he would not go; but tragic only when a free choice is unwisely made, or when passion guides, or when the stress of storm finds the spirit too weak or unresourceful to meet and endure it. In all the greater novels, too, which may be said to end with The Egoist, Mr. Meredith's style, when at its best, has the elasticity of steel with its strength. Like a 'sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' it can, within the moment, bend like a bow and spring again to the bright, quivering, darting line that bears the inexsuperable point. And with all its faults, it is a robust organic style that suits its subject. One might trace in it many influences, and that in spite of its distinctive peculiarities. In a sentence such as this, "Their common candle wore with dignity the brigand's hat of midnight, and cocked a drunken eye at them from under it,' one seems to hear the voice of Dickens; in Rhoda Fleming there are passages which George Eliot might have written; the hand of Thackeray might have assisted in the creation of Jack Raikes in Evan

Harrington; Carlyle's Teutonic style in full blast is displayed in Farina. Yet in its strength and weakness it is wholly its creator's; on this page magnificent and unsurpassable, on the next intolerable and unreadable. The ordinary man, it has been said, is satisfied to see something going on, the man of more intelligence must be made to feel, the man of high cultivation must be made to reflect. To the society of the highly cultivated Mr. Meredith makes his appeal, and not without response. But had his judgment equalled his genius, he would, I believe, have appealed to them past all resistance, as no English novelist has yet appealed to them, in an appeal that would have been irresistible for all time.

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL1

THE terms classic and romantic, freely bandied about in the literary criticism of the last hundred years, can hardly be said to have attained any definite connotation, any sharp precision of meaning. The classic authors, par excellence, are the ancients, the makers of the literatures of Greece or Rome; and the classics of our own or any other literature are the writers who best represent it, who have given to it whatever of beauty or of dignity it may possess. Thus far we speak the language of the market-place, and are intelligible to the average citizen; but if we adopt the phrases of the schools, if we speak of the classics of our own literature as romantic in temper; of some of the ancients, like Virgil, as no less so; if we speak of classic subjects as treated by Marlowe or Shelley in the romantic manner, or of romantic subjects by Keats and Byron in the classic couplet, we introduce conceptions to the comprehension of which a course of literary history is the only avenue.

1 The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, by W. L. Phelps.

It is, indeed, neither possible nor desirable to harden into absolute definition the general sense suggested by these terms, but because, however loosely they may be applied, they represent certain real characteristics, represent each a clearly marked group or blend of qualities, we are called upon to retain them, and to render to ourselves some account of them. The term classic needs no interpretation as regards origin-that which belongs to the first class-but a serviceable suggestion may be gleaned from the origin of the term romantic. When the northern barbarians streamed through the various gates of the declining Roman empire, and, victorious, imposed their rule upon the conquered Romans, they rendered a homage to the power that once had ruled the world by acknowledging the language of the conquered inhabitants as the language which best represented the results of civilisation, as the language proper to the church, the school, and the law, the lingua Latina. But beside the purer language of the scholar, they found flourishing a language of the people, lingua Romana rustica, and with this the language of the conquering tribes was eventually mingled. The mother Latin thus became the parent of several daughters, the Romance languages. By Romance of course we mean no longer a language, but a type of composition, of which the poems and tales