MEREDITH'S IMVOLVED SENTENCES

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XXI, 23 November 1895, Page 650

MEREDITH'S IMVOLVED SENTENCES

Emhrson said of Carlyle that there is not to be found iu his writings a sentence which will not parse. It would be a decidedly difficnlt task to attempt to parse the following complete sentences from the pen of the emineut George Meredith in his latest novel published in Scribner's Magazine : ‘ She wrestled with him where the darknesses rolled their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of the nether world. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of their deeds, compared them—and name the one crushed !’ ‘ She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband— no busband ; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said ; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man’s remaining one chance of happiness.’ ‘ Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her brief words between the gasps, or heaved on them, with perspicuous humurous bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.’