Soldiers
and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the
shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis
and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the
butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess
d'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,
laughing and telling tales together?
The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an
increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest
in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been
done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense
interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather
increased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of
the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its
own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the
European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland
of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more
unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played
a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of
all.
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