R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith 183If the essay is a window into Meredith's mind, it is alsosomething of a key to his own artistic development; forthis may be held to have reached its maturity in TheEgoist. Now The Egoist is pure Comedy in conception andexecution; moreover, it is even constructed as a playshould be. Certain superfluities allowed for, it falls perfectlyinto acts and scenes. It is hard to believe that, atsome time or other, he did not think of it as a play. Andnow, or a little later, the fragments of The Sentimentalistsmust have begun to accumulate in his desk. Handwritingdoes something to date them, but the kinship of thesubject to passages in the essay does more. There theyare at any rate, his sketches for such a comedy as Molieremight have put a hand to. They were found after hisdeath, and (again by the evidence of the handwriting) hehad worked over them from time to time in his lateryears. They are parts, evidently, of a full-length play,they come from the first two acts of it; and the plot ofthe whole can be guessed at—as slight a plot as is LeMisanthrope's; the comedy in the idea. Some scraps arein prose, some in verse, sometimes the verse had been rewritteninto prose. J. M. Barrie took them in hand, putthem in sequence, taking little away, adding nothing ofhis own but a stage direction here and there, and theywere staged at the Duke of York's theatre in 1910.'"The Sentimentalists": an unfinished play by GeorgeMeredith'—there was, for the few, a thrill in the verysight of the placard. But public taste had not changedgreatly in those thirty years; nor has another twentychanged it, except, in the theatre, somewhat for the worse.It was, and is, still dominated by the 'idle laughers'.The Sentimentalists, it may be owned, is not a full, or afully flavoured, meal of entertainment; the civil 'thankyou'it gained was perhaps all that could be expected.And yet, and yet, one asked—and is still asking!—is there