in art.  I do not make this admission because I am intimidated by the weight and height of the critical authority with which I am overshadowed, but from a certain sense, of which I am as distinctly conscious, viz., that the author is, how shall I put it? the French would say “quelqu’un,” that expresses what I would say in English.  I remember, too, that although a man may be able to understand anything, that there must be some modes of thoughts and attitudes of mind which we are so naturally antagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy with, that we are in no true sense critics of them.  Such are the thoughts that come to me when I read Mr. George Meredith.  I try to console myself with such reflections, and then I break forth, and crying passionately:—­jerks, wire splintered wood.  In Balzac, which I know by heart, in Shakespeare, which I have just begun to love, I find words deeply impregnated with the savour of life; but in George Meredith there is nothing but crackjaw sentences, empty and unpleasant in the mouth as sterile nuts.  I could select hundreds of phrases which Mr. Meredith would probably call epigrams, and I would defy anyone to say they were wise, graceful or witty.  I do not know any book more tedious than “Tragic Comedians,” more pretentious, more blatant; it struts and screams, stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a cockatoo.  More than fifty pages I could not read.

How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the “Nuptials of Attila” write this? but my soul returned no answer, and I listened as one in a hollow mountain side.  My opinion of George Meredith never ceases to puzzle me.  He is of the north, I am of the south.  Carlyle, Mr. Robert Browning, and George Meredith are the three essentially northern writers; in them there is nothing of Latin sensuality and subtlety.

I took up “Rhoda Fleming.”  I found some exquisite bits of description in it, but I heartily wished them in verse, they were motives for poems; and there was some wit.  I remember a passage very racy indeed, of middle-class England.  Antony, I think is the man’s name, describes how he is interrupted at his tea; a paragraph of seven or ten lines with “I am having my tea, I am at my tea,” running through it for refrain.  Then a description of a lodging-house dinner:  “a block of bread on a lonely plate, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam.”  A little ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty.  I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make research; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he began to talk!... four, five, six, ten pages of talk, and such talk!  I can offer no opinion why Mr. George Meredith committed them to paper; it is not narrative, it is not witty, nor is it sentimental, nor is it profound.  I read it once; my mind astonished at receiving no sensation cried out like a child at a milkless breast.  I read the pages again ... did I understand?  Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable.  The story is surprisingly commonplace—­the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as those of a Drury Lane melodrama.