Thus, back of whatever may be the external story—­the Italian struggle for unity in “Vittoria,” English radicalism in “Beauchamp’s Career,” a seduction melodrama in “Rhoda Fleming”—­there is always with Meredith a steady interpretation of life, a principle of belief.  It is his crowning distinction that he can make an intellectual appeal quite aside from the particular story he is telling;—­and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist.  We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target.  He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker.  Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation.  With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind.  It is because we hail him as philosopher, wit and poet that he fails comparatively as artist.  He shows throughout his work a sublime carelessness of workmanship on the structural side of his craft; but in those essentials, dialogue, character and scene, he rises to the peaks of his profession.

Probably more readers are offended by his mannerisms of style than by any other defect; and they are undeniable.  The opening chapter of “Diana” is a hard thing to get by; the same may be said of the similar chapter in “Beauchamp’s Career.”  In “One of our Conquerors,” early and late, the manner is such as to lose for him even tried adherents.  Is the trouble one of thought or expression?  And is it honest or an affectation?  Meredith in some books—­and in all books more or less—­adopts a strangely indirect, over-elaborated, far-fetched and fantastic style, which those who love him are fain to deplore.  The author’s learning gets in his way and leads him into recondite allusions; besides this, he has that quality of mind which is stimulated into finding analogies on every side, so that image is piled on image and side-paths of thought open up in the heat of this mental activity.  Part of the difficulty arises from surplusage of imagination.  Sometimes it is used in the service of comment (often satirical); again in a kind of Greek chorus to the drama, greatly to its injury; or in pure description, where it is hardly less offensive.  Thus in “The Egoist” we read:  “Willoughby shadowed a deep droop on the bend of his neck before Clara,” and reflection shows that all this absurdly acrobatic phrase means is that the hero bowed to the lady.  An utterly simple occurrence and thus described!  It is all the more strange and aggravating in that it comes from a man who on hundreds of occasions writes English as pungent, sonorous and sweet as any writer in the history of the native literature.  This is true both of dialogue and narrative.  He is the most quotable of authors; his Pilgrim’s Scrip is stuffed full of precious sayings, expressing many moods of emotion and interpreting the world under its varied aspects of romance, beauty, wit and drama.