George Meredith: A Study

It is our habit to class under the name of light literature all fiction, from that of Richardson to the ephemeral stories of the latest London favourite, though, as a matter of fact, even that historic bore, Gibbon, is not heavier reading than the novels of Richardson. We accept the term ‘light’ literature in a high sense as well as in a low one, and to the high class of light writers belong our old English masters and friends, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray. These writers were purely and simply novelists, and if they showed themselves to the thinkers in their just interpretation of the motives whence actions and complications arise, and the consequences to which they lead us, it was hardly because they thought so much as that they observed exactly, and, with the exquisite intuition of genius, penetrated life and its meaning by the road of sympathy rather than reflection, and unconsciously gave the colour of philosophy to their reproduction of observations.