dy of the modern woman is not that she is
not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.
This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem
and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a
creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so
different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is
full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a
schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred
pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but
he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what
one really gets from such riots of felicity as _Evan Harrington_ or
_Harry Richmond_. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And the
chief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more people
could enjoy him too.

I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to
open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian
peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might
delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with
Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture,
which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even the
best novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott or
Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of _John Inglesant_
could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell but
remembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction in
the same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry.
He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much.

There is one more matter that may best be considered here, though
briefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with the
Victorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;
not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are several
great Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories I
employ; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the world
itself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind by
paying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patriotic
warrior, or a priest--it was always the instinct of the English to do it
by pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or a
critic, but he survives as a C