Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming
comedies about _The Caxtons_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_; none of his other
works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception
of _A Strange Story_; but his _Coming Race_ is historically interesting
as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a
weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about
Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that
there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to
the hesitating Crimean Parliament: "Destroy your Government and save
your army."
With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the
later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways
weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that
was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very
well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name
of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,
doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English
village.
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