The Quality of George Meredith by Oscar Wilde

Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by / flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except / language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an / artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in / Shakespeare -- Touchstone, I think -- talks about a man who is always / breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might / serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he / is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of / realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate / choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee / to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt / against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite / sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means / he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with / wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of / the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he / bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The / difference between such a book as M. Zola's _L'Assommoir_ and Balzac's / _Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and / imaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters; ' said Baudelaire, 'are / gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his / fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded / to the muzzle with will.

The very scullions have genius. ' A steady / course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our / acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of / fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. / One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de / Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to / rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when / I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created / life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a / value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of / his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbo_ or / _Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de / Bragelonne_. -- _The Decay of Lying_.