To succeed in qualifying a style so varied and so strange as Mr. Meredith’s, and composed of so many diverse elements, would be difficult even for his peers. Its quality is at the same time rugged and elusive, obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and profound, harsh and most musically tender, light as a summer cloud, majestic as a storm. But his great defect is artificiality. His splendid pages and his matchless dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour of the midnight oil, and we see most of his characters through a blinding glitter of limelight. This excessive use of artificial illumination, while fascinating us and compelling our admiration for the writer’s extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irritates us at times, and we long for the mental repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy prose that rests the eye and the brain. There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English. He is unapproachable as a wrestler with words and phrases, and infuses dead speech with the vitality of blood and muscles. Words with him are like thoughts--strong, living, tangible to the touch of the soul. They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, but upon the mind. When he is not playing queer tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us, flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial glamour about them. He ceases to be the inhuman metaphorist, and becomes our brother again, and we forget that he ever terrified us. I open ‘Evan Harrington’ at random, and alight on a paragraph where each word is vividly set in a perfect whole. There is no twist or turning here, and as we see the red harvest-moon and the dark water and trees, so we seem to touch the hand of suffering youth: