Now why is it that we all really feel that this
Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it
would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is
something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he
disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling
that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by
man--or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real
Pagan--the man that does believe in Pan.
It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the aesthetic
appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell
has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe.
Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox
compromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,
Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria has
begun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:
to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outside
the Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very different
naturalistic paths.
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