There is a very old story to the effect that a party of gentlemen who were compiling a dictionary described a crab as ‘a small red animal which walks backwards.’ Apart from the facts that the crab is not red, is not an animal, and does not walk backwards, the definition was pronounced to be wholly admirable. I was reminded of this bit of ancient history when, some time ago, I read a criticism on George Meredith from the pen of Mr. George Moore. Mr. Moore represented his subject as a shouting, gesticulating man in a crowd, who, in spite of great efforts to be heard, remained unintelligible. As a description of a curiously calm sage who soliloquises for his own amusement in a study this is perfect. The enormous growth in the number of unthinking readers, and the corresponding increase in our printed output, have brought about some singular conditions, and, amongst them, this: that it is possible to sustain a reputation by the mere act of being absurd.

In attempting anything like a just review of the influence of the critical press in recent years, one has to admit that in its treatment of George Meredith it has performed a very considerable and praiseworthy public service. For many years Meredith worked in obscurity so far as the general public were concerned. Here and there he won an impassioned admirer, and from his beginning it may be said that he found audience fit though few; but he owes much of the present extent of his reputation to the efforts of generous and enlightened critics, who would not let the public rest until they had at least given his genius a hearing. He is now, and has for some time been, a fashionable cult. It is not likely that in the broad sense he will ever be a popular writer, for the mass of novel-readers are an idle and pleasure-loving folk, and no mere idler and pleasure-seeker will read Meredith often or read him long at a time. The little book which the angel gave to John of Patmos, commanding that he should eat it, was like honey in the mouth, but in the belly it was bitter. To the reader who first approaches him, a book of Meredith’s offers an accurate contrast to the roll presented by the angel. It is tough chewing, but in digestion most suave and fortifying. The people who instantly enjoy him, who relish him at first bite, are rare. Fine intelligences are always rare. Personally, I am not one of the happy few. I am at my third reading of any one of Meredith’s later books before I am wholly at my ease with it. I can find a most satisfying simile (to myself). A new book of Meredith’s comes to me like a hamper of noble wines. I know the vintages, and I rejoice. I set to work to open the hamper. It is corded and wired in the most exasperating way, but at last I get it open. That is my first reading. Then I range my bottles in the cellar—port, burgundy, hock, champagne, imperial tokay; subtle and inspiring beverages, not grown in common vineyards, and demanding to be labelled. That is my second reading. Then I sit down to my wine, and that is my third; and in any book of Meredith’s I have a cellarful for a lifetime.

In view of a benefaction like this it becomes a man to be grateful, but for all that it is a pity that a great writer and a willing reader should be held apart by any avoidable hindrances. It is quite true that an immediate popularity is no test of high merit. But the real man of genius is, after all, he who permanently appeals to the widest public.

To the middle-aged and the elderly fiction is a luxury. A story-book is like a pipe. It soothes and gratifies, and it helps an idle hour to pass. But younger people find actual food or actual poison where their elders find mere amusement. There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who feel that they would like to have a clear outlook on things, who are searching more or less in earnest for a mental standing-place and point of view. If I had my way they should all be made to read Meredith, and the book at which I would start them should be ‘The Shaving of Shagpat.’ It is in the nature of a handbook or guide to a young person of genius, it is true, and we can’t all be persons of genius; but there is enough human nature in it to make it serviceable to all but the stupid. In the midst of its fantastic phantasmagoria there is a view of life so sane, so lofty, so feminine-tender, so masculine-strong, so piercing, keen and clear, that it is not easy to find an expression for admiration which shall be at once adequate and sober. On the mere surface it is almost as good as the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and at the first flush of it you think that fancy is running riot. But when once the intention is grasped you find beneath that playful foam of seeming fun and frolic a very astonishing and deep philosophy, and the whole wild masquerade is filled with meaning. Read ‘The Shaving of Shagpat,’ earnest young men and maidens. There is not much that is better for mere amusement in all the libraries, and if you care for the ripe conclusions of a scholar and a gentleman who knows the whole game of life better than any other man now living, you may find them there.

I learn, on very good authority, that Meredith has but a poor comparative opinion of his earlier work, and that he would dissent rather strongly from the critic who pronounced ‘The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’ his masterpiece. Yet it seems to me to be so, and in one particular it takes high rank indeed. It is remarkable that whilst love-making is so essential a part of the general human business, and whilst no novel or play which ignores it stands much chance of success, there are only two or three really virile presentations in fiction of ‘the way of a man with a maid.’ Shakspere gave us one in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but then Shakspere gave us everything. Charles Reade, in ‘Hard Cash,’ has shown us a pure girl growing into pure passion—a bit of truth and beauty which alone might make a sterling and enduring name for him. And Meredith in ‘Feverel’ has given us scenes of young courtship which are beyond the praises of a writer like myself. The two young people on their magic island are amongst the real-ideal figures which haunt my mind with sweetness. Nature on either side is virginal. It flames and trembles with natural passion both in boy and girl, and they are as pure as a pair of daisies. Any workman in the school of Namby-Pamby could have kept their purity. Any writer of the Roman-candle-volcanic tribe could have heaped up their fires, after a fashion. But for this special piece of work God had first to make a gentleman, and then to give him genius.

One peculiarity in Meredith is worthy of notice. He makes known to us the interior personality of his characters; he does this so completely that we are persuaded that we could predict their line of conduct in given circumstances; and then a set of circumstances occur in which they do something we should never have believed of them, and we have to confess that their maker is just and right, and that there is no disputing him.

There are inconsistencies in his pages more glaring than anything we can imagine outside real life. The average artist, dealing with these manifestations, is a spectacle for pity, as the average man would be on Blondin’s tight rope. The faintest deviation, the most momentary uncertainty of footing, a doubt, even, and it is all over. But Meredith never falters. He proves the impossible true by the mere fact of recording it.

He has no cranks or crazes or ‘isms. He sees human nature with an eye which is at once broad and microscopic. What seem the very faults of style are virtues pushed to an extreme. He says more in a page than most men can say in a chapter. Modern science can put the nutritive properties of a whole ox into a very modest canister. Meredith’s best sentences have gone through just such a digestive process. He is not for everybody’s table, but he is a pride and a delight to the pick of English epicures.

From Meredith to Hall Caine is from the study of the analyst to the foundry of the statuary; from art in cold calm to art in stormy fire. Here, too, is a force at work but it is strength at stress, and not at ease. Meredith is not very greatly moved. He sympathises, but he sympathises from the brain. His heart is right towards the world, but it is cool. The man we are now dealing with has a passionate sympathy. He is hot at heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,—and making allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous, eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them—avarice, lust, hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, but Romance snatches him away again, and claims him for her own. His native and ineradicable concept of a work of art in fiction is a story that shall shake the soul. This inborn passion for the vast and splendid in spiritual things is always in strict subordination to a moral purpose. Here is the reason for his hold upon the English-speaking people, which is probably, at this moment, deeper and wider than that of any other living writer.

I do not deal in what I am now about to say with the critical adjustment of relative powers, but simply with a question of temperament You may draw a triangle, and at one of its extremes you may place Meredith, at another Stevenson, and at another Hall Caine. At one extremity you have an artist whose methods are almost purely intellectual, at the next you have an embodiment of sympathetic receptivity, and at the third a man whose forces are almost wholly emotional and dynamic. Stevenson’s main literary prompting was to say a thing as well as it could possibly be said. Hall Caine’s chief spur is a fiery impulse to a moral warning.

From the earliest stages of Hall Caine’s literary career until now his impulse has not changed, but he has made such a steady advance in craftsmanship as could not be made by any man who did not take his work in serious earnest. The faults of his first style still linger, but they are chastened. He has the defect of his quality. In each of his books he strives for an increasing stress of passion, a sustained crescendo; a full and steady breeze for the beginning, and then a gale, a tempest, a tornado. The story is always constructed with this view towards emotional growth and culmination. Sometimes he lets us see the effort this prodigious task imposes upon him, but in his later work more and more rarely. The natural temptation is towards a resonant and insistent eloquence, and he occasionally still forgets that he might, with ease to himself, profitably leave the catastrophe he has created to make its own impression. The artistic demand in the form of work to which his instinct draws him is heavier than in any other. It is simply to be white-hot in purpose and stone-cold in self-criticism at the same instant of time.

Bar Meredith, who is quite sui generis, and Rudyard Kipling, whose characteristics will be dealt with later on, Hall Caine has less of the mark of his predecessors upon him than any of his contemporaries. His work has grown out of himself. He has had a word to speak, and he has spoken it So far he has increased in strength with every book, has grown more master of his own conceptions and himself. In ‘A Son of Hagar’ he forced his story upon his reader in defiance of possibility; but no such blot on construction as the continued presence of a London cad in the person of a Cumberland man in the latter’s native village has been seen in his more recent work. It is worth notice that even in this portion of his story the narrator shows no remotest sign of a disposition to crane at any of the numerous fences which lie before him. He takes them all in his stride, and the reader goes with him, willy-nilly, protesting perhaps, but helplessly whirled along in the author’s grip. This faculty of daring is sometimes an essential to the story-teller’s art, and Hall Caine has it in abundance, not merely in the occasional facing of improbabilities, but in that much loftier and more admirable form where it enables him to confront the cataclysmic emotions of the mind, and to carry to a legitimate conclusion scenes of tremendous conception and of no less tremendous difficulty. In the minds of vulgar and careless readers the defects which are hardest to separate from this form of art are so many added beauties, just as the over-emphasis of a tragic actor is the very thing which best appeals to the gallery. But Hall Caine does not address himself to the vulgar and the careless. He is eager to leave his reputation to his peers and to posterity. With every year of ripening power his capacity for self-restraint has grown. When it has come of age in him, there will be nothing but fair and well. There has been no man in his time who has shown a deeper reverence for his work, or a more consistent increase in his command of it. His method is large and noble, in accord with his design. He has given us the right to look to him for better and better and always better, and it is only in the direction indicated that he can mend.