But Meredith's gift of phrase and his knack of knocking out epigrams, and his mastery over metaphor and lyrical description cannot be too highly commended. Diana is "wind-blown but ascending." When Redworth sees her kindling a fire, "a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows." After Sandra's singing, the stillness settled back again "like one folding up a precious jewel." A dull professor "pores over a little inexactitude in phrases and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." Of one who has ceased to love we hear that "the passion in her was like a place of waves evaporated to a crust of salt." Of a lady's letter we learn that it "flourished with light strokes all over, like a field of the bearded barley." Of a heroine we are told that: "She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed fearless of a sting; the lady patted them as her swans." There is brilliant illumination in such comparisons, a light shed instantaneously upon traits and mental experiences otherwise not to be revealed. When the Egoist would affectionately approach his shrinking Clara, nothing could better deliver the situation than Meredith's simile: "The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by."
It is felicity in the use of rhetorical figure that enables Meredith to characterize the style of a Carlyle as, "resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencement running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints." It is Meredith's gift for phrase that enables him to paint those wonderful backgrounds for action which are the despair of common writers. Sometimes the scenes are sketched in with but a touch or two of suggestion. So, when Richard Feverel and Lucy spend an evening afloat, Meredith writes: "Hanging between two heavens on the lake: floating to her voice: the moon stepping over and through white shoals of soft high clouds above and below: floating to her voice—no other breath abroad! His soul went out of his body as he listened." Or, when Richard, in gay company, passes a night at Richmond, Meredith says simply: "Silver was seen far out on Thames. The wine ebbed, and the laughter. Sentiment and cigars took up the wondrous tale."
Sometimes the description is long and minute, but always it is beautifully fresh. Thus the coming of dawn is pictured in The Amazing Marriage: "The smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised the breast high to drink it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.... The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted from brown to purple black.... The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against the edge of golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their rivers."
IV
Meredith's style receives its final and distinctive flavor, however, from the liberal dash of aphorism with which his books are sprinkled. Often an epigram will turn upon some metaphor. Such is the statement that: "A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and worry corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not," or the exclamation: "Who are not fools to be set spinning, if we choose to whip them with their vanity! It is the consolation of the great to watch them spin." Such, too, is the reflection that: "Most of the people one has at table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they call it conversation." More frequently, the epigram is a neat generalization left abstract, as for example: "Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered"; "Cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves"; "Fools run jabbering of the irony of fate to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes"; "Expediency is man's wisdom; doing right is God's"; "Women cannot repose on a man who is not positive; nor have they much gratification in confounding him"; "Convictions are generally first impressions sealed with later prejudices"; "The hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before they can appreciate one another."
A thousand such jewels glitter in the richly wrought tapestry of Meredith's style. That he painstakingly inserted them and wove this fabric to attract attention by its singularity and beauty, he cheerfully admits in a passage of Emilia in England. "The point to be considered," he there remarks, "is whether fiction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a philosophical work should. When we ask for facts simply we feel the intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part. In the one case the classical robe, in the other any medieval phantasy of clothing."
The difficulty with a style so artificial and intellectualized is obvious. Meredith, according to Brownell, "flatters one's cleverness at first, but in the end he fatigues it." The perpetual crackle of aphorism and metaphor surprises, gratifies, and then wearies; for a writer who will never say a plain thing plainly, not only keeps his readers under strain, but soon seems himself to be straining. Nowhere is this more evident than in Meredith's predilection for repeating a single happy phrase such as the epithet "rogue in porcelain" applied to a heroine. Since the phrase tickles his fancy, he plays with it, drops it, picks it up, mumbles it over and over as a dog might a bone, and through chapter after chapter is ready at any pretext to run round and round with it barking. Despite his assiduous striving for novelty, therefore, Meredith is often tedious, an effect induced, not merely by his style (whether repetitious or gasping after eccentricity), but also by his method. He is so intent upon weaving his commentary upon every speech and action that the occasion of the commentary is smothered. A phrase becomes the text of a sermon, a gesture the excuse for paragraphs of oblique reflection. Thus he forfeits the advantage of downright sincerity and of forthright progress, and teases interest out of all patience.
V
Since Meredith is an intellectualist, we naturally ask what may be his philosophy. Unlike Ibsen or Browning, he preaches no doctrine. He offers no explicit theory of life. Nor does he, like Dickens or Reade or Brieux, advocate any special reform. He is never a propagandist. Some have lamented this fact; more have seen in it an argument for his universality and permanence. Though he fight no battles for specific causes, his influence is arrayed in general against certain tendencies that he disapproves and would laugh to defeat. Egoism, sentimentalism, hypocrisy, are fair game for his comedy. As an intellectualist he dislikes and distrusts excess of emotion—feeling indulged for its own sake. "Sentimentalists," he declares, "are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."
Well might Mrs. Carlyle complain that Meredith's work lacked tears. That it does so he would be the first to admit, for he questions the worth of pathos for any true captain of his soul. "Pathos is a tide; often it carries the awakener of it off his feet," Meredith writes. "We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that venerable lawgiver had knocked the water out of it." So Meredith sacrifices passion to analysis. His heroes and heroines rarely love so simply and so ardently as do Richard and Lucy; but the affection of even this delectable pair is modified in presentation by the playful cynicism of the narrator of their story. On the other hand, it is futile to cavil at Meredith or any other artist for lacking such qualities as are incompatible with those he most notably possesses. You cannot expect abandon of passion in the characters of a novelist whose forte is detachment and sublimated common sense. Your intellectualist is not to be blamed if he fails to write as a sentimentalist.