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." To match that--it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of the author himself--you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals--say to Edward Benlowes himself.

But this is nothing: it is at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of Dickens's own transposed into another key.