hich he was surrounded
was the attitude of a clubman. These men wrote; they got through their
writing as quickly as they could; and during the rest of the day they were
clubmen, or hosts, or guests. Trollope, who dashed off his literary work
with a watch in front of him before 8.30 of a morning, who hunted three
days a week, dined out enormously, and gave his best hours to fighting
Rowland Hill in the Post Office--Trollope merely carried to its logical
conclusion the principle of his mightier rivals. What was the matter with
all of them, after a holy fear of their publics, was simple ignorance.
George Eliot was not ignorant. Her mind was more distinguished than the
minds of the great three. But she was too preoccupied by moral questions
to be a first-class creative artist. And she was a woman. A woman, at that
epoch, dared not write an entirely honest novel! Nor a man either! Between
Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in
England. The fear of the public, the lust of popularity, feminine prudery,
sentimentalism, Victorian niceness--one or other of these things prevented
honesty.

* * * * *

In "Richard Feverel," what a loosening of the bonds! What a renaissance!
Nobody since Fielding would have ventured to write the Star and Garter
chapter in "Richard Feverel." It was the announcer of a sort of dawn. But
there are fearful faults in "Richard Feverel." The book is sicklied o'er
with the pale cast of the excellent Charlotte M. Yonge. The large
constructional lines of it are bad. The separation of Lucy and Richard is
never explained, and cannot be explained. The whole business of Sir Julius
is grotesque. And the conclusion is quite arbitrary. It is a weak book,
full of episodic power and overloaded with wit. "Diana of the Crossways"
is even worse. I am still awaiting from some ardent Meredithian an
explanation of Diana's marriage that does not insult my intelligence. Nor
is "One of our Conquerors" very good. I read it again recently, and was
sad. In my view, "The Egoist" and "Rhoda Fleming" are the best of the
novels, and I don't know that I prefer one to the other. The latter ought
to have been called "Dahlia Fleming," and not "Rhoda." When one thinks of
the rich colour, the variety, the breadth, the constant intellectual
distinction, the sheer brilliant power of novels such as these, one
perceives that a "great Victorian" could only have succeeded in an age