Meredith's style has attracted a great deal of comment, both favourable and disapproving.
Early on, critics noted his indebtedness to two writers in particular: Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning. Stevenson notes that the triad "soon became a critical cliché." Some critics felt that he was more influenced by the former than the latter, including George Pierce Baker, who asked: "May not Mr. Meredith be called the Carlyle of fiction?"[50]
His novels, far from being action-packed, are instead driven by what he called "action of the mind", and the large amounts of dialogue have led to their being dismissed as "talky".[51] Critic Neil Roberts describes "the often irritating but profoundly original world of Meredith's novelistic art", noting that these are two sides of "the sense of the new" in his work and that this is "still felt by readers encountering Meredith today". Roberts argues that Meredith's use of dialogue and multiple voices make him "a Bakhtinian novelist par excellence".[52]
His prose, aphoristic and allusive, has often been seen as a barrier to comprehension, with some critics arguing that the style, rather than being a means to an end, serves as an end in itself. Oscar Wilde's description of "chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning" has been echoed by many others. A recurring objection is the mental effort required to decipher his meaning. "Readers," writes Vanessa L. Ryan, "complained that Meredith made too constant an appeal to thoughtfulness ... [and] charged his writing with too many ideas and mental abstractions."[53]
However, admirers since George Eliot have applauded the poetic qualities of Meredith's prose. For Max Beerbohm, he "packs tight all his pages with wit, philosophy, poetry, and psychological analysis". Yet even an enthusiast as fervent as Beerbohm can concede that "His obscurity, like that of Carlyle and Browning, is due less to extreme subtlety than to the plethoric abundance of his ideas".[54]
In a thesis published in Meredith's lifetime, Leah Durand Jones commented that his style is "generally conceded to be more subtle and abstruse, more complex and intricate than that of any other modern writer": he "usually avoids the conventional", achieves "independence of thought and expression" through the "brilliancy of his epigrams", finds "analogies in the most unexpected places", and possesses a "power of compression" which can disconcert readers, not least through a "constant omission of pronouns, relatives, or even nouns and verbs" that demands "swiftness of comprehension".[55]
As a poet, Meredith has drawn both praise and criticism for his innovation in metrical and stanzaic forms, along with his unorthodox syntax and metaphors. But his poetry is more varied than many assessments recognise; noting the tendency to overlook the pessimistic poetry Meredith produced after Modern Love and until the 1880s, Arthur L. Simpson explains that "The contrast between the derivative Romanticism of the early poems and the evolutionary naturalism of those published after 1880 is striking", and notes, of Meredith's work in the 1860s and 1870s, that "The tensions and polarities of the poems of this period bear comparison to those in the poetry of the early Tennyson, of Arnold, and of the Hopkins of the terrible sonnets."[56]
