*

covering a multitude of doctrines. Mr Lowell has well remarked that 'The Swiss Confederation, unlike almost every other State in Europe, has no irreconcilables; the only persons in its territory who could in any sense be classed under that name being a mere handful of anarchists, and these are foreigners.' The Swiss socialists, as a body, do not dream of suppressing private property whether in land or in other things. It would be rather curious if they did in a country which surpasses all others in the wide distribution of land ownership. its 5,378,122 acres devoted to agriculture being divided among 258,639 proprietors. As in Switzerland we have government of the people by the people, so we have ownership of the land by the people, two great factors of social order and of a stable polity. It is no paradox to say that socialism in Switzerland is conservative. It aims not at destruction, but at construction; not at rapine, but at the rational distribution of wealth. It aims at socialising the public services-and the aim seems to me reasonable enough. It does not aim at establishing an omnipotent State. The remedy which it proposes for the evils of capitalism is co-operation. As M. Th. Curti, a high authority, remarks: 'In face of the success with which social reform has been crowned in Switzerland, theoretic debates about the essence of socialism and the like could present no great attraction to our workmen. Speculations about the iron law of wages, the proletariat of the masses, and the strife between classes, did not much unsettle their minds, because, thanks to our political liberties, the field was always open further to social reform, and a continual exchange of ideas, and of concessions, took place between the various classes of society.'†

Once more, does our country present any more disgraceful spectacle than the presence of an army of vagrants in our midst, parading London streets, infesting country roads, and filling the casual wards of our workhouses? Let us see how the Swiss have dealt with this problem of vagrancy. In the first place, they distinguish between the work-seekers and the work-shunners. In most

* The average size of the farms throughout the whole of Switzerland is not more than twenty-one acres.

† Quoted by Prof. Clerget, 'La Suisse au xx Siècle,' p. 176.

Cantons a wanderer who can prove that he is a genuine labourer may obtain food and lodging at any one of some hundreds of 'resthouses' dotted over a large part of Switzerland. On the other hand, if a man persists in begging, if he makes his wife and family a charge on the public by his devotion to liquor, if he is, in the expressive word which finds a place in the Swiss statutes, 'workshy,' he is warned once or twice, and, if that proves ineffective, he is sent to a forced-labour farm for some months, or even years, where he has to work hard, whilst strenuous efforts are made to improve his character. This system has been eminently successful-indeed it has almost entirely delivered Switzerland from vagrancy. I cannot see to what rational objection it is open. It is merciful, nay, kind, to the honest man out of work. And if it provides stern treatment for the denizens of its labour colonies, that is precisely what is merited by the tramp who deliberately avoids every kind of lawful occupation, diverts to himself the sympathy due to the industrious poor, and terrorises the community.

I might say much more, but perhaps I have said enough to show why I have arrived at the same conclusion as Mr Lowell:

'The Swiss Confederation is, on the whole, the most successful democracy in the world. . . . The people are contented; the Government is patriotic, far-sighted, efficient, and economical, steady in its policy, not changing its course with party fluctuations. Corruption in public life is almost unknown. . Officials are selected on their merits, and retained as long as they can do their work, and yet the evils of a bureaucracy scarcely exist. All this bears witness to the capacity of the Swiss for self-government.'

Students of political science will nowhere find more striking object-lessons in popular government. They should hardly require the caution with which Mr Lowell supplements his encomium: 'We must beware of thinking that the methods [of the Swiss publicists] would produce the same effects under different conditions. The problem they have had to solve is that of self-government among a small, stable, and frugal people; and this is far simpler than self-government in a great, rich, and ambitious nation.'* W. S. LILLY.

* Vol. ii, p. 335.

Art. 9.-GEORGE MEREDITH.

The Collected Works of George Meredith. Thirty-one vols. London: Constable, 1896-8.

THE art of fiction, in all its innumerable divagations of the last hundred and fifty years, must truly by now have provided material enough for a generalised criticism of its nature, its scope, its limiting conditions; but criticism can hardly be said to have yet made any calculated attempt to survey the whole parti-coloured field and to define the principles which seem to be implied. In the early and bravely irresponsible days of the novel there could be no possibility of such a definition. So long as the art was still purely experimental, so long as it could spread in all directions over virgin soil, criticism could merely watch discreetly and take provisional note of failures and successes. But fiction must follow, and is already following, the line of development which carries it from its first expansive thoughtlessness to self-conscious deliberation. It must run its course, like other forms of art; it must lose certain qualities and assume others; it must submit to maturity and make the best of it without trying to reproduce the essentially youthful graces of its past. It continues so unmistakably to hold its own as the most characteristic form of our time that a distinguished future, it is impossible to doubt, still lies before it. But it must pay the penalty of its prolonged predominance by learning to know itself' and to realise its principles. Such a process implies loss in a hundred ways, loss perhaps of the very qualities for which we most incline to value the art; but if the sacrifice is inevitable it is only the sharper challenge to the novelist to develope new values in their place. An artist is of his time, and if he inherits a form which has already yielded its first freshness he has to find the base of his work in the qualities that remain. Criticism steps in at this stage and tries to express the results that have been established, patiently hoping, be it confessed, to avoid its usual mistake of making the art square with its formula instead of moulding its formula on the art.

6

No attempt can of course be made here to co-ordinate

the scattered achievements of fiction in the manner suggested; but the single illustrious case to be considered will be approached as far as possible from this point of view. The work of George Meredith, so sumptuous and so varied, has for its admirers intellectual, moral, philosophical appeals which have perhaps to some extent obscured the question of its strictly artistic characterisation. Much has been written upon the strong consistent view of the world, of nature and society, which lies alike behind his novels and his poetry; but the art which went to its expression has usually been treated as a detachable matter, something to be estimated side by side, even if in the same prominence, with the personal doctrines of the great writer. Meredith cut so deep into his material and laid open such new sources that the fruition of his thought has occupied his critics before the form in which it was embodied. If it is attempted to reverse the process there can be little danger of overlooking the matter for the sake of the manner, for from this side the two things cannot be separated. The personality of an artist can be disentangled from his art, but never his art from his personality.

True, surely, of all writers, this is trebly true of Meredith, so sharply stamped with the mark of his brain and spirit was everything he touched. The most obviously Shakespearean in a certain sense of modern authors, he was nevertheless the least so if the word is used of that aspect of Shakespeare's work which gives us the most striking example in all literature of an apparent exception to our rule, the aspect in which the writer is merged, almost beyond possibility of recovery, in his creations. Meredith is never for an instant in this sense dramatic. His own presence dominates every page of his books; and often enough, both in his prose and his poetry, we seem less to be handling a fashioned and self-complete work of art than to be actually present in his studio, watching while he flies impetuously at the marble which hides the statue, and perhaps at times more conscious of the process, of the crackle of blows and the hail of white chips, than of the lurking goddess. Yet even so, though the din and the effort may interfere with one kind of enjoyment, the display of power, the determination and the onslaught, joined with the sense

that the possible prize is worth the struggle and that the unconquered block does in fact conceal the divine-all this makes of such an experience an exhilarating memory for craftsman or critic. It fires the athletic quality which is part of the mind of every artist, and shows in the perfected work, when at other times it is given us rounded and flawless, the temper which the highest beauty receives from brain alone.

Meredith's art, indeed, as we follow it from book to book, reflects one long conflict with stubborn and recalcitrant material. It is as though he could never be content until he should make language do a little more than it ever will. Most writers by middle life have acquiesced in the limitations of their medium, and their submission is dignified, rightly enough, by the style of mastery of their craft. There is, then, in the typical case, a moment at which hand and brain work in harmony and produce their best work, before the time arrives when the hand, now completely controlled, is found to be closing upon a gradually weakening sub stance. That is, on the whole, the evolution more or less clearly to be traced in most cases. But Meredith's record is utterly different. The compromise between intention and result, between thought and word, is struck with extraordinary precocity in his earliest work and with ever increasing difficulty in his later. Not of course necessarily on this account is 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' a better book than One of our Conquerors,' when the scope, the significance, the final product of the balance is considered, as well as its nicety. But while it is solely a question of the command of the medium in which he worked, it is easy to see that the Meredith of 1859 was far surer of poised and sustained effect than the Meredith of thirty years later. The rocky utterance with which his stories tended more and more to be wrenched into being was the exaggeration no doubt of an inherent mannerism; but to name it thus does not carry us far. With the living force which Meredith throughout poured into his work, the history of its style becomes the history of its substance; and the growing sense of effort merely implies that he charged his art with ever more complicated burdens. No other imaginative writer of our time has had to reckon with a Vol. 212.-No. 422.

P