Erbe. At any rate, I mused, the famous sweethearts of Verona were fortunate in their escape from the experience that

.as love's brief morning wore

They found love not as it was before.

Plunged in such meditations, recapitulating the always more dispiriting impressions received at Juliet's Tomb, and turning into the Via Pallone after crossing the Adigetto, I almost stumbled over a bundle of rags, wherein a tiny girl, nutbrown, with ruddy cheeks, was busily engaged in raking the gutter. Here was true life again, making amends for the silly performance just left. My appreciation of the fact went in the form of a mezza lira, value less than a dime, and the little thing evidently believed me insane for showering riches upon her far in excess of the soldo, limit of her wildest dreams, begged by an impudent, somewhat bigger but equally dirty brother. Speechless from supreme felicity, she handed me in exchange the faded buttercup that decorated their latest mudpie. If the morning's traffic had hardly been satisfactory, so I thought when attacking my lunch at the Colomba d'Oro, it was a splendid preparation for the disappointment lurking in renewed acquaintance with Mantua, the Mantua of Virgil, Giulio Romano, the Gonzagas; Mantua, the nest of treason, whose criminal record smells to heaven; Mantua, the supposed last habitat of the young hero whose lips in their pathetic pallor of death were kissed by his desperate bride that haply some poison might hang on them. If her tomb is shown, why not his, or what may go by that name, to derive the fullest pecuniary advantage from the English poet's appropriating and putting the stamp of genius on the lovers' tale, which it was not a boast to let Prince Escalus conclude with the words we all know by heart:

For never was a story of more woe

Than that of Juliet and her Romeo.

MEREDITH'S COMIC MUSE1

BY L. L. CLICK

Judged by dog-eared canons of the art, Meredith may not be a great novelist; but he unquestionably ranks among the great men who have written fiction. In originality of method, as well as in general intellectual eminence, his position is high and solitary. His title to distinction, however, rests upon something much more substantial than solitude. He is a good example of those exceptional individuals who appear from time to time with the ability to break through complacent convention and pierce to underlying reality and eternal verity. Such men are recognized by their ethical, rather than conventional, standards. They are of the temper of poets and seers, and we go to them not so much for information as for inspiration.

It is a commonplace that Meredith was out of harmony with Victorianism. He has been charged with being unaware of its existence. On the contrary, he was so keenly aware of its meaning that he reacted strongly against almost every one of its tenets. No category of the age can contain him. Adopting the popular art-form of his time, he sought, with more tact than Carlyle and more courage than Thackeray, to teach the age what ailed it. Like Richter, he would say: Be great enough to despise the world; and greater in order to esteem it. His harmony with Victorianism is that of a rich and distinct overtone.

In the light of modern thought, which seeks in nature the ethical standards as well as the physical origin of man, Meredith's message is clear enough. Its cardinal principles are a courageous facing of the uncompromising facts of human existence and the absolute trustworthiness of the moral senses.

'The substance of this article is taken from the introduction to an unpublished study, The "Chorus" in the Novels of Meredith.

His evolution goes on to include mind and spirit as well as

In this light his world swings clear of the pelting platitudes concerning chaos and takes on an ordered significance for all serious students of modern society. It is in this sense that Meredith is the master of modern novelists. He may have wanted some of the graces of the smooth story-teller, but he was gifted above most men with poetic insight, imaginative expression, and philosophic acumen.

But his prolix and uneclectic manner puzzles and perplexes. His original and somewhat stoical philosophy of society pivots on what he is pleased to call comedy. But comedy in the usual acceptation of the term it is not. It is more like his definition of life, something strangely mixed. Its object is not laughter, but thought. Its home is the drawing-room of a society of cultivated people. Its position is that of a sane, observing mind hovering above congregated men and women, relentlessly and sympathetically guarding the final purposes of "earth." Such is Meredith's Comic Muse, the key to his philosophy, the index to his art. To adopt one of his felicitous figures, it is the pole-star in all his intellectual navigation. It polarizes the brilliant reflections of every facet of his intellect and makes of him something more than a mere teller of tales.

No writer has ever been at more pains to tell us what he is about. In hundreds of hints and here and there in set treatises throughout his entire works, both prose and poetry, he explains in detail and expounds at length both his meaning and his manner. At the London Institution, in 1877, he delivered a lecture "On Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit" in

"The Woods of Westermain.

which he defines and illustrates his theory. The prelude to The Egoist is a set treatise on comedy. His long "Ode to the Comic Spirit" is of the same nature; so also are both "The Two Masks" and "The Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt." And yet his serious use of the "comic spirit" is so original and so objectionable to "those of the hazy region and the ideal that is not to be disturbed" that an appreciation of Meredith still has something of the effect of classifying one in a cult or coterie.

His plan is to exhibit the secret springs of character in dramatic episodes "under the stress of fiery situation." Hence his diverting allusions rather than straightforward narrative. Independent of the sharp lines of distinction, he regards the novel as a drama written out more or less fully, with occasional and apposite comments here and there by the chorus, either in the person of the author or in some cleverly conceived and often thinly veiled device. His novels are, because of their governing muse, essentially dramas, or rather series of dramatic episodes revolving about some highly individualized outstanding character or centering around a prolonged and keenly analyzed study of some problem in society.

The object of his guardian spirit is not the externally comic, with which other writers with their old-fashioned ideals of both art and society can deal simply and well. But its legitimate prey is found in the drawing-rooms of cultivated men and women in whom still lurk some of the ": manners of SouthSea Islanders under city veneer." It is in search of the comedy of the "rebel heart" and the "dragon self" cherishing conventions contrary to reason's right mind. Its ultimate aim is thought, not laughter. If we laugh at all, we laugh at ourselves or our own kind, not at the ridiculous rabble as in Dickens or the obvious snobs as in Thackeray. Egotism, sentimentalism, cowardice, unreason are watched over with a birch rod. As comedy quâ comedy, this may be midsummer madness, yet there is method in it.

In details of nomenclature as well as in large outlines of

structure, his method betrays the dramaturge. The Egoist he calls "a comedy in narrative." The stormy love-story of Ferdinand Lassalle and Helena von Dönnigens he turns into fiction as The Tragic Comedians. His stories frequently begin with prologues and end with epilogues. Chapters often open and close with curtains; scenes and acts are occasionally referred to by numbers. But it is clear that his stage is seldom, if ever, the concrete institution of today, but rather an academic abstraction more suited to the purpose of his Comic Muse and fashioned largely after the greater freedom and larger meaning of the ancient Greek theatre. The large design and serious purpose of his comedies are essentially Greek, and his execution is unmistakably so, with its chorus, its gods, its Bacchic oaths, its earth-born philosophy, its tragic inevitable

ness.

Such is the Alpine point of view of this spirit "born of our united social intelligence." In various guises its surveys the entire field of Meredith's vigorous and vital thinking, appearing now as the Philosopher, now as Common Sense. Now it poses as Public Opinion, again as Dame Gossip. Now its wit and wisdom, its satire and epigram, overflow into such receptacles as The Pilgrim's Scrip, Maxims for Men, the Book of Egoism, imaginary diaries and the like; again they gather round some character of an observing and philosophizing turn of mind. Or if no other scapegoat is forthcoming for the sacrifice, the author merely looks over his shoulder and delivers his own "birch-rod blows" or rings down his own guardian Muse's "silvery laughter of the mind."

The point of service may be illustrated by The Egoist. The spirit of the book is an abstract idea made awfully real through inimitable characterization. Sir Willoughby Patterne has, through heritage and training, come to take an anti-social position. The position puts him directly in the spot-light of Meredith's Comic Muse. The message of the novel is to the intellect to detect the comedy in the contrast between Sir Willoughby and the wiser world about him; "that is to say, soci