It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:
and the totterer Earth detests,
Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes such lines as:
Look I once back, a broken pinion I,
He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this phrase:
Ravenous all the line for speed.
An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours' the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect, where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only, to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate meanings, and to translate as it goes.
Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his poems, the Hymn to Colour, he can begin one stanza with this ample magnificence: