nd Hardy were, intellectually speaking,
mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newman
was to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they
collided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog.
There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.

Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they did
mean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only man
in the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out of
the low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan
is a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousand
years could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due to
Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever
taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say
that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it
was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales.
This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn
of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached
the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.

Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God is
the great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying that
Pan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense is
this: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good at
bottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. It
is the whole point in most of Meredith's tales that there is something
behind us that often saves us when we understand neither it nor
ourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: but
that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith's
brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least
interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not
doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's mind in that are with
those who can see Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous
pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly
meaning as ideas.

But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (which
means nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And he
often expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take,
for instance, that phrase so often quoted: