At times he is almost edifying. _Robert
Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre
ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems
thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that
it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in
the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it.
Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England
is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school
of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only
thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave
it raw.--_The Decay of Lying_.
THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH
Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except
language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an
artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in
Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25