And for all that, their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn.

His Defects.

For Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great writers as well as one of the best and most fascinating.  He is a sun that has broken out into innumerable spots.  The better half of his genius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half.  He writes with the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide

in his right.  He is the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would.  As Shakespeare, in Johnson’s phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of the professional wit.  He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief.  He is tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure; his helpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound.  That is the secret of his unpopularity.  His stories are not often good stories and are seldom well told; his ingenuity and intelligence are always misleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly and elaborately as main incidents; he is ever ready to discuss, to ramble, to theorise, to dogmatise, to indulge in a little irony or a little reflection or a little artistic misdemeanour of some sort.  But other novelists have done these things before him, and have been none the less popular, and are actually none the less readable.  None, however, has pushed the foppery of style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Meredith.  Not infrequently he writes page after page

of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as heart could wish; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness the splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere.  To read him at the rate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and hearty admiration for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and make much of his merits.  But they are few who can take a novel on such terms as these, and to read your Meredith straight off is to have an indigestion of epigram, and to be incapable of distinguishing good from bad: the author of the parting between Richard and Lucy Feverel—a high-water mark of novelistic passion and emotion—from the creator of Mr. Raikes and Dr. Shrapnel, which are two of the most flagrant unrealities ever perpetrated in the name of fiction by an artist of genius.

Another Way.

On the whole, I think, he does not often say anything not worth hearing.  He is too wise for that; and, besides, he is strenuously in earnest about his work.  He has a noble sense of the dignity of art and the responsibilities of the artist; he will set down nothing that is to his mind unworthy to be recorded; his treatment of his material is distinguished by the presence of an intellectual passion

(as it were) that makes whatever he does considerable and deserving of attention and respect.  But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed: the achievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration; the attempt at completeness is too laboured and too manifest—the feat is done but by a painful and ungraceful process.  There is genius, but there is not felicity: that, one is inclined to say, is the distinguishing note of Mr. Meredith’s work, in prose and verse alike.  There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be, there is no gainsaying its existence.  To be concentrated in form, to be suggestive in material, to say nothing that is not of permanent value, and only to say it in such terms as are charged to the fullest with significance—this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith’s ambition.  Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable.  The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Molière, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Molière’s antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determined dandyism of form and style.  There is something bourgeois in his intolerance of the commonplace, something fanatical

in the intemperance of his regard for artifice.  ‘Le dandy,’ says Baudelaire, ‘doit aspirer à être sublime sans interruption.  Il doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir.’  That, you are tempted to believe, is Mr. Meredith’s theory of expression.  ‘Ce qu’il y a dans le mauvais goût,’ is elsewhere the opinion of the same unamiable artist in paradox, ‘c’est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.’  Is that, you ask yourself, the reason why Mr. Meredith is so contemptuous of the general public?—why he will stoop to no sort of concession nor permit himself a mite of patience with the herd whose intellect is content with such poor fodder as Scott and Dickens and Dumas?  Be it as it may, the effect is the same.  Our author is bent upon being ‘uninterruptedly sublime’; and we must take him as he wills and as we find him.  He loses of course; and we suffer.  But none the less do we cherish his society, and none the less are we interested in his processes, and enchanted (when we are clever enough) by his results.  He lacks felicity, I have said; but he has charm as well as power, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off.  The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once republican and free.  You resent the domination, but you enjoy it too, and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery.