63. GEORGE MEREDITH. HARRY RICHMOND.
"Harry Richmond" is at once the least Meredithian and the best of all Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who influence a generation or two and then stem to become antiquated and faded.
It is when he is least philosophical and least moralistic—as in the superbly imaginative figure of Richmond Roy—that he is at his greatest. There is, throughout his work, an unpleasing strain, like the vibration of a rope drawn out too tight,—a strain and a tug of intellectual intensity, that is not fulfilled by any corresponding intellectual wisdom. His descriptions of nature, in his poems, as well as in his prose works, have an original vigor and a pungent tang of their own; but the twisted violence of their introduction, full of queer jolts and jerks, prevents their impressing one with any sense of calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these passages. They are too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. The same fault may be remarked in the rounding off of the Meredithian plots where one is so seldom conscious of the presence of the "inevitable" and so teased by the "obstinate questionings" of purely mental problems.
Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail.