Balzac's. But something must now be said of the fourth dimension--some
would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions--which is or are
required to put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself think
that more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that if
Mohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged to
endow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the
reduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will have
to proceed. There will be great joy in that other world when he has done
it: and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say that
no one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.

The intrusive element can, however, only be designated singly by rather
enlarging the strict and usual sense of the term Style so as to include
not merely diction, but the whole manner of presentation--what, in
short, is intended by the French word _faire_. For this, or part of
this, he made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology-explanation
in the lines prefixed to the collected edition, and entitled "The
Promise in Disturbance." I am not sure that there is any single place
where a parallel excuse-defiance musters itself up in the novels: but
there are scores (the prelude to _The Egoist_ occurs foremost) where it
is scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much more required
there. Indeed as far as the narrow sense of "style" goes, the
peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically
admitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a _sors
Meredithiana_, taken from _Rhoda Fleming_, one of the simplest of the
books:--

"Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distended
and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the
venerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue."