and Meredith: but
it must always have been patent to some. The contrast is of course the
first to strike:--the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque,
of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utter
absence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it in
Meredith--divers other differences of the same general kind. But to any
one reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit,
kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to be
different," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, and
probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not
anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ actually worked.

"Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac,
and of Meredith are not impossible worlds: for the only worlds which are
impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of
these is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" which
are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not with
Balzac's. But something must now be said of the fourth dimension--some
would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions--which is or are
required to put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself think
that more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that if
Mohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged to
endow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the
reduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will have
to proceed. There will be great joy in that other world when he has done
it: and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say that
no one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.

The intrusive element can, however, only be designated singly by rather
enlarging the strict and usual sense of the term Style so as to include
not merely diction, but the whole manner of presentation--what, in
short, is intended by the French word _faire_. For this, or part of
this, he made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology-explanation
in the lines prefixed to the collected edition, and entitled "The
Promise in Disturbance." I am not sure that there is any single place
where a parallel excuse-defiance musters itself up in the novels: but
there are scores (the prelude to _The Egoist_ occurs foremost) where it
is scat