Crude and rough and jagged
and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and
tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some
curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations
which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven
inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite
substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of
rain-drenched moors, the crying of the wind in the Scotch firs, the
long lines of black rooks drifting across the twilight,--these things
become, in the savage style of this extraordinary girl, the very
symbols and tokens of the power that rends her spirit.
63. GEORGE MEREDITH. HARRY RICHMOND.
"Harry Richmond" is at once the least Meredithian and the best of all
Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George
Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who
influence a generation or two and then stem to become antiquated and
faded.
It is when he is least philosophical and least moralistic--as in the
superbly imaginative figure of Richmond Roy--that he is at his
greatest.
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