George Meredith by Alice Meynell — Read

If the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his generation the companion of poetry, and thus the second great imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony, the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion-the work of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë-works of genius as they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.

George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge of the human heart as though knowledge in itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used his sympathy. He worked much beyond and far above the regions in which the wrangle about art with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward. No critic will ever impugn Meredith's transcendent purpose. It is not possible to imagine his prose or poetry without it.