of too much ability. He has
both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
solutions.

In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
to come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
_Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
down at random, hardly suggesting