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 scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much more required there.  Indeed as far as the narrow sense of “style” goes, the peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically admitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs.  Here is a sors Meredithiana, taken from Rhoda Fleming, one of the simplest of the books:—­

“Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distended and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue.”

To match that—­it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of the author himself—­you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals—­say to Edward Benlowes himself.  But this is nothing:  it is at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of Dickens’s own transposed into another key.  But take this opening of the fifteenth chapter of Diana of the Crossways:—­

“The Gods of this world’s contests, against whom our poor stripped individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us:  they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion.  It is of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent human mass of the hour.  But they have one worshipful element in them, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case—­to every case.  And the People so far directed by them may boast of healthfulness.  Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact.  One side is vanquished according to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished.”

Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a pointe; there is a thought, and the author’s admirers would, I suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought and phrase.  But is it so?  Is the thought really anything more than the perfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it will die, or at least go into abeyance?  Does that thought really gain anything from being tricked out with not