r tea
baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend:
'Behold! the funeral of picnic!'"

If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was
not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. His
obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the
obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed in
being as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, and
objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He was
impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as
man to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the
fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace
with it. "How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!" he
once said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of the
imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in
which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take
a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed
between himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a
mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying
skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting
desperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of
genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our
breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.

In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud
that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. "I remember," she
says, "bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he
implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved
when I consented to do so!" He would always "prefer to bestow rather than
to accept gifts." Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was
ungrateful, suggests that "no one should expect an eagle to be grateful."
But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to
love the author of _Love in a Valley_ and _Richard Feverel_. Meredith was
too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who had
attacked him, he said: "They have always been abusing me. I have been
observing them. It is the crueller process." It is quite true, but it was
a superior person who said it.

Meredith, however, among hi