He also had a sincere hope in the strength of
womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begotten
gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference as
many champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killed
the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neither
of these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. The
disaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but that
they are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is
not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.
This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem
and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a
creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so
different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is
full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a
schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred
pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but
he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what
one really gets from such riots of felicity as _Evan Harrington_ or
_Harry Richmond_.
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