thwarted by the nervous critical misgivings bred in the hard
struggle against Victorian taste and the literary conventions
of his day; so his music was broken.

George Meredith, with his mixed blood, difficult beginnings,
intense self-consciousness and cosmopolitan education, was a
typical child of his time; and in him all the uncertain restless
energies of his time seemed to find an artistic scapegoat. Lyric
rhythms, as he could control them, were not his most congenial
mode of utterance. He needed something more epigrammatic;
and by an ancient paradox of the art of expression we may
even say that he was most individual--in a sense most lyrical
when he was occupied with his characters, and evoking his own
emotion over them. And his real lyric is to be found in Richard
Feverel, or in that curious autobiography, Evan Harrington.
Take the memorable induction to a chapter, with a flying
coach in an April sou'wester to set the note, which occurs
towards the end of the last novel--

"The coach went rushing against the glorious high wind.
It stirred his blood, freshened his cheeks, gave a bright tone
of zest to his eyes, as he cast them on the young green country.
Not banished from the breath of heaven! . . . Not banished
from the help that is always reached to us when we have fairly
taken the right road; and that for him is the road to Lymport."

There the rhythm is with Meredith and not against him.

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