much obvious expression of the feeling in action. But in fiction it is the plot and the incidents in which the characters take part, rather than the personal qualities of the characters themselves, which move the reader's emotions. Plenty of James's characters could warm us enough if he had put them in a different sort of novel-that is, if he had shown them in melodramatic scenes.

The question whether James's men and women are real and interesting is inextricably bound up with the larger question whether his view of the novel is the true one. A novelist should, according to his idea, record a personal impression of life. Now "life" is, at least according to the dictionaries, the broadest of terms, including both the simple actions and the elementary instincts common to all men since the days of the cave-dwellers, and the intricate experiences and complicated motives of modern existence. There may be as many impressions of life as there are observers to be impressed. The possible varieties of the novel, according to the definition given, are therefore innumerable; and the appreciation of one form does not preclude the enjoyment of another. Yet many readers who are fairly catholic in their tastes stop short at the variety offered by Henry James. Probably no other recent novelist has been so harshly criticised. Usually readers who do not care for a story-teller are content to let him alone, but in this case they have felt impelled to objurgation. Part of this violent dislike comes from his obscurity and his mannerisms, but more of it comes from a disapproval of the impression of life that he chooses to give. Indeed, there is a popular usage that would almost deny the word "life" to the form of human existence that he presents. If a boy beats about the slums, and pastes labels on blackingboxes, or ships as a sailor before the mast, all agree that he has seen "life." But if another boy learns something of the art of two hemispheres, and comes in contact with men of intellectual and social power, and finds his adventure in reading the Revue des deux Mondes, and burying his face in newly-imported volumes for the "English smell" of printer's ink, commentators are likely to remark that he "has had no

experience with life at first hand." It is needless to quibble over terms; and if the two boys become novelists, it is needless to decide a priori which is the better of the two different kinds of books they will write; but in the democracy of to-day the second will surely receive least sympathy. In a recent volume of American criticism a well-known authority complains of James in the usual fashion:

Of strong, elemental men and women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing.

Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized, occupationless men and women, James is at his best.

But a highly civilized man is a man for a' that, and it may be fairly asked why he is not an approved subject for treatment in fiction. One reason is that the visible happenings of conventional society do not stir the emotions like murder, and elopements, and deeds of physical prowess, and the tender manifestations of young love. If Christopher Newman had scaled the convent wall and carried off his mistress, if Isabel Archer had plotted dark revenge on Madame Merle and run away with her impetuous American lover, if in the tense scene at Fawns the Princess had madly denounced Mrs. Verver and later stabbed her husband, the readers would have been thrilled, and would have pronounced the actors "elemental." This sort of thing is good, and it is to be hoped everybody enjoys it part of the time-more of the time, for that matter, than any other kind of story. When he does there are Scott and Cooper and Stevenson and the writers whom our critic names to supply his wants. But most of the interesting women we actually know are more like Isabel Archer than like Hardy's Tess. And they too are women, and their experiences in love, in suffering, in the endurance of wrong are also life. And this life is just as valuable a subject of observation as the other.

So one may argue without in the least convincing those who dislike the novelist of modern society. This may be because the treatment of complex life requires so much analysis and analysis retards the story. Simpler characters, under simpler

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conditions, act from motives that are easily understood. If a woman murders her faithless husband there is no great need of psychological subtleties. The reader says "jealousy," and there is an end of the matter. But if she conceals and endures and fails to accuse in the presence of certainty, and puts on a brave front before the world, that is because of the action of many forces. She, too, has within her nature the "elemental" passions, else they would not be elemental. But she is also influenced by the repression of conventionality, the pull of various aspects of duty, and many other motives, some working unknown to her in the depths of her consciousness, and all impelling her in different directions. What the resultant will be is a most complicated problem, and in justifying his answer to the reader the author must resort to much analysis. The Golden Bowl could hardly be represented in moving pictures. As the amount of striking incident decreases the slow and subtle discussion of motives must increase, and when the outcome of the motives is at last seen, even this is often not unusual or violent.

In the view of his admirers, Henry James as a novelist gives life, not as it used to be, or as it may be under some strange surroundings, or even as we might like to make it in a world created by ourselves, but very much as we have known it to be. He leaves us thinking of his characters as we think of real men and women. He makes us feel the immense number of forces, external and internal, that compass men about and compel their actions, especially in the crises of their lives. And he does all this as an artist, and in spite of regrettable mannerisms and a possible over-emphasis on technique gives us novels consciously rounded and finished as English novels have not been before. Is this over-ingenuity, and triviality, and dilettantism? or is it the development of a higher and more satisfying art? The answer is bound to depend, after all, on the temperament and the philosophy cf life of the reader; and, as James's characters so often say, "There you are."

SOME INFLUENCES OF MEREDITH'S PHILOSOPHY

UPON HIS FICTION

O. J. CAMPBELL

The vitality of many characters in George Meredith's novels has always been doubtful. Of late, certain of his heroines and some of those persons who provide sport for his Comic Spirit are gradually fading out of human semblance. This debility is the inevitable result of the lack of authentic creative power in the energy which gave them life. They were brought into being not to signalize an artist's insight into human nature, but to illustrate and to prove a philosopher's ideas. They sprang full-grown from the brain of Meredith the metaphysician.

It is not that his advanced social ideas provided a program for his fiction. His art never suffered that degradation. It is rather that his desire to explain man's place in Nature led him to fashion characters who would make his demonstration most clear. His heroic women, therefore, like Diana and Carinthia, were designed to bring to English society the latest tidings from the processes of Nature. His comic figures, like Sir Willoughby Patterne, Purcell Barrett, and all the members of the Pole family, are the embodiment of those forces which postpone the establishment of the ideal social condition. This state will come into being automatically when each person can express with perfect freedom that part of the old Earth which seeks to blossom in him. These humorous characters were created, then, to furnish food to the chastening Comic Spirit which was to laugh in the millennium.

The women in Meredith's novels whom we are asked to admire, illustrate the conceptions of Nature which are set forth in his poems. They present dramatically the philosophy of his verse. Indeed the relation is even closer than this. They

are rather the culmination,-the triumphant expression, of the eternal processes of Earth. This is the idea that Richard Le Gallienne expresses when he says, "No writer with whom I am acquainted has made us so realize the value and significance of flesh, and spirit as the flower of it. In his women we seem to see the transmutation in process.'

Meredith adopted as fundamental to human life and character all the implications of the biological doctrines of evolution. Upon that basis he has built up a philosophy of flux, development and progress which in his mind possesses both metaphysical and human finality. All the needs of his being are satisfied by the philosophy of change. In The Woods of Westermain, where the sympathetic questioner can learn all the truths of Nature, he finds

Change the strongest son of Life

Has the Spirit here to wife

and his own spirit finds supreme content in this marriage. Unlike Tennyson he is ready at all times to

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change;

for change gives him the rapture of the forward view, which constitutes spiritual life as the mere processes of change do the physical life. The only permanence is death.

Cry we for permanence fast
Permanence hangs by the grave.

Nature, Meredith loves then, because she is at once the root and spirit of that change which is life.

In The Woods of Westermain Meredith comprehends this truth in all its human implications. There his mind can peer back through all the stages of evolution,

Back to hours when mind was mud.

In so doing it will learn how inextricably Earth, which is Meredith's favorite symbol for Nature, is interthreaded with him and his kind. Man is sprung from the earth in a very