ells 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