In Harry Richmond
it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a
romantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits
well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the
youth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it
comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous,
informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer.
True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a
story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern
times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of
spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life--true that in so
far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's
books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp
and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the
century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the
nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the
machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of
appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that
is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a
series of adventures loosely connected--connected only by the fact
that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of
narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and
the young man shall speak for himself.
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