Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/112

100 unexaggerated, so guarded against all violence and all pedantry, that he must be finally cleared of the charge of either constructive or restrictive preciosity in his writing as a whole. He sought excellence in style, not singularity or self-indulgence. He was really an admirable workman in whom the need for utterance, the burden and impulse of ideas, though not small, were apt to fall short of his exceptional craving for beauty of statement.

Whatever dispute there may be over the foregoing criticisms, there can be none, I think, over the judgment that Mr. Meredith's style is the most pronounced outbreak of preciosity in modern English literature. I here, if ever, we may allow ourselves a quasi-Pantagruelian protest. It is indeed impossible for a reader who respects Mr. Meredith's genius to read him — or at least his later works without irritation at his extraordinary ill-usage or language. Old admirers, going back to his earlier works, never free from the sin of preciosity, recognise that there has been an almost continuous deterioration the fatal law or all purposive preciosity. In the earlier novels there were at times signal beauties of phrase, sentences in which the strain towards utterance was transmuted into fire and radiance, sentences of the fine poet who underlay and even now underlies that ever-thickening crust or preciosity and verbal affectation. Even in One of Our Conquerors there seemed, to the tolerant sense, to be still some gleams of the old flame, flashing at long intervals through the scoriæ or unsmelted speech. But in Lord Ormont and his Aminta neither patience nor despair can discover in whole chapters aught but the lava and cinders of language. In mere tortuosity the writing is Rh