Life — May 28, 1891 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

GEORGE MEREDITH’S RECENT NOVEL. TQ VEN the most sympathetic admirers of George Meredith 1 will read his latest novel, “One of Our Conquerors” (Roberts Bros.), with divided opinions. For one hundred pages or more you are brow-beaten and baffled in pursuit of the Idea which is always the inspiration of his work, Here, as in the beginning of so many of his novels, he sports with the reader, confuses him with a score of false trails—puts in color so at ran- dom that you are hopeless of seeing it blend into form and figure. He gives you the uneasy feeling that he cannot quite sce his characters in the elemental mist, that he is working slowly toward them and drawing you with him, and that perhaps both you inthe may miss them altogether in the fog. Then the light begins to break—the haze is luminous ; there are flashes of id and a sudden breaking away of the fog as a keen intellectual wind blows steadily toward the harbor. If you have had patience so far you will then find that the author has evolved one of the most remarkable situations of his. very remarkable worl that you are face to face with a tragic problem that is too human to be called psychological. Putting aside all question of the undoubted formlessness of parts of this novel—an excess of eccentricity which tries the patience of the very elect—there remain the three characters, Victor, Nataly and Nesta Radnor (father, mother and daughter), as the equal of his best achievements in creative fiction, The women are of the kind who take strong men captive—not by frivolous devices and pretty sentiments, but by the force of natural passion. No other modern novelist has so dignitied love, putting it on a plane comprehensible alike to the man of intelligence and the woman of acute intuitions. He puts it where the great scientists have pointed the way—for in all Meredith's works Love is the force of Nature seeking to do its best for the race. . Py . HE tragedy in this book (as in all his former novels) comes. of strong characters following the best dictates of Nature and striving to follow the detinite way, whether it is the way of the world and of conventionality or not. You are made to feel intensely that the pure Nataly and the weak JWW/rs. Marsett are put under the same ban by the world—and you cannot see how it could be otherwise. The end of it all is “that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts, and the dance, the luxu- rious displays, and the reverential Sunday service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to critics and rebels, and to anyone vainly trying to stand alone.” This is another phase of the same problem which Beauchamp, Sandra, Diana, and Harry Richmond tried to solve in their vain endeavors to batter through the walls of convention. And in ase Meredith's answer has been the same—if you fight this battle you will surely suffer, suffer and be defeated in the eyes of the world, He always, however, showed the way HOW HE GOT HIS MODEL. TION OF THE SERPENT, “1 CAN'T, FOR THE LIFE OF ME, GET THIS STUFFED SNAKE TO ASSUME A LIPE-LIKE APPEARANCE." “LT IAVE COME TO THIS MENAGERIE EVERY DAY FOR THE LAST MONTH AND CAN NEVER SEE A SNAKE MOVE.” comicbooks.com