Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the
simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas
could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been
evident at once that Meredith and 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.
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