GEORGE MEREDITH'S LETTERS The year 1912 has brought us no braver, richer, wiser books than the two volumes of The Letters of George Meredith ; and though criticism, as is proper, sprang at once to the salute on the morning of their first appearance, it will be long before it moves beyond their range, ceases to sound and to distil them. Not, indeed, that they require interpreters. They are not a prize for the literate, to be prepared for in the novels, read in their light or undeservingly. Rather they come before the novels, make a centre from which the latter spring — to come to them is like breaking through a bright labyrinth of boughs to the solid stem which shows us the quiet logic of the branching, blossomed maze. And shows us views beyond. We stand at the centre of a circle of which the novels are but an elaborated segment. " The art of novels," he says in one of these letters, " is to present a picture of life ; but novel-writing embraces only a narrow portion of life. I trust that I keep nay eyes on the larger outlook." These books let us share that outlook, and to do that is to be swept up as to a sudden tower, and see men and the world afresh, and the land lying clear like a plan, great winds meanwhile bringing news of heaven, stirring and renovating the blood. It is hard to speak of the sight without rhetoric. Yet the reasons for its supremacy are plain. Like Goethe, like Shakespeare, this man was that rare thing the poet-philosopher, 238
