If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit.  His obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something.  Meredith believed in being as mysterious as an oracle.  He assumed the Olympian manner, and objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place.  He was impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as man to man, but as Apollo from his seat.  This was probably a result of the fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace with it.  “How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!” he once said when he had lost the power of his legs.  Such buoyancy of the imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed between himself and ordinary mortals.  He dressed his genius in a mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting desperately after him could see.  Shakespeare and the greatest men of genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our breath.  Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.

In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts.  “I remember,” she says, “bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved when I consented to do so!” He would always “prefer to bestow rather than to accept gifts.”  Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was ungrateful, suggests that “no one should expect an eagle to be grateful.”  But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to love the author of Love in a Valley and Richard Feverel.  Meredith was too keenly aware what an eagle he was.  Speaking of the reviewers who had attacked him, he said:  “They have always been abusing me.  I have been observing them.  It is the crueller process.”  It is quite true, but it was a superior person who said it.

Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an Olympian.  Lady Butcher’s first meeting with him took place when she was a girl of thirteen.  She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said:  “I know a madman who lives on Box Hill.  He’s quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and sunrises.  Let’s go and shout him up!” It does Meredith credit that he got out of bed and joined them, “his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers.”  Even when the small girl insisted on “reading