Morley became editor of the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ and Meredith's contributions to it, which included some reviews of new books, grew frequent. During part of 1867–8 Mr. Morley was absent in America and Meredith was left in charge of the magazine. In 1868 Meredith made his single incursion into active politics by assisting his friend Maxse, who was standing as radical candidate for Southampton. His powers were now at their ripest, and during 1869 and 1870 he was engaged on the great first-person romance of ‘The Adventures of Harry Richmond.’ Serial publication in the ‘Cornhill’ was arranged on liberal terms (500l. for copyright and 100l. on sale of 500 copies), and the first part appeared in Sept. 1870. There were fifteen illustrations by Du Maurier. The father and son theme of ‘Feverel’ is reanimated in an atmosphere at times dazzlingly operatic; Richmond Roy, on whose character Meredith lavished all his powers, stalks larger than life alongside of Wilkins Micawber and My Uncle Toby. Not one of the author's books rivals this one in invention.
Meanwhile Meredith, whose sympathy with France was increasing in strength, though he admitted now that the war was chargeable on France and its emperor, wrote for the ‘Fortnightly’ (Jan. 1871) a rather cryptic defensive poem—‘France, 1870,’ which formed the nucleus of his ‘Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History.’ French history and memoir (especially Napoleonic) and the fruitage of European travel remained his favourite pastime to the end. In 1872 his friend Leslie Stephen welcomed to the ‘Cornhill’ his ‘Song of Theodolinda.’ Meredith spent short holiday seasons more than once in the early seventies in the neighbourhood of Dreux at Nonancourt on the Avre, where his wife's brothers owned wool-spinning mills. His succeeding book, ‘Beauchamp's Career,’ is enriched by local colour derived from observations made during this Norman sojourn as well as at the Café Florian in 1866. The next two novels, ‘Beauchamp's Career’ and ‘The Egoist,’ mark the summit of Meredith's power of concentration. The first, ‘Beauchamp's Career’ (refused by ‘Cornhill’), began to appear in a painfully condensed form in the ‘Fortnightly’ in August 1874. The book protests through the brains of Beauchamp, the young naval officer (a reflection of Maxse), on the one hand against lolling aristocrats who refuse to lead and against the false idols of Manchester on the other; the complex hero is hampered by apple-fever (as Meredith styles his prepossession for some of the fairest daughters of Eve) and at times by a species of megalomania. The construction keeps the interest intensely alive, and the book ends with the sting of the hero's death by drowning.
Meredith was at this time acquiring new friends, among whom were Moncure Conway, R. L. Stevenson, Russell Lowell, and W. E. Henley; his books were becoming known among the younger generation at Oxford; he was seen in London, though never a familiar figure there, at picture exhibitions or concerts, or dining at Krehl's in Hanover Square. He was preparing to drop his work for the Ipswich paper, done as he said with his toes to leave room for serener operations above, but was still dependent pecuniarily to a considerable extent upon journalism and reading for Chapman & Hall. He managed to combine with his weekly expedition to London a reading engagement to Miss Wood, ‘the great lady of Eltham,’ a great-aunt of Sir Evelyn Wood, a woman of marked intelligence, with whom he often discussed contemporary topics. This brought in an appreciable addition to his income. After the reading he returned to the Garrick to dine and then by the 8.40 train from London Bridge to Box Hill. The cool reception accorded to his ‘favourite child,’ ‘Beauchamp's Career’ (despite a highly favourable notice by Traill in the ‘Pall Mall’), chilled him. Mark Pattison spoke of his name on a book as a label to novel-readers, warning them not to touch. Two short stories in the ‘New Quarterly Magazine’—‘The House on the Beach’ (Jan. 1877) and ‘The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper,’ a little masterpiece (July 1877)—added range to his repute. In a lecture on ‘The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,’ which he delivered at the London Institution on 1 Feb. 1877, he defined one of his dominant conceptions of life—the destined triumph of comedy in its tireless conflict with sentimentalism. The lecture was printed with amendments in the ‘New Quarterly Magazine’ and not separately until 1897. Meredith continued to harp upon the function of the Comic Spirit, notably in the prelude to ‘The Egoist,’ in the ‘Ode to the Comic Spirit,’ and in ‘The Two Masks.’
After the lecture a new period in Meredith's career as a novelist opens. For a quarter of a century he had been producing novels of the first rank. Yet his best work was still addressed to empty benches.
