He had, in virtue of his birth-year, 182 8,the strong decency, the ...

He had, in virtue of his birth-year, 182 8,the strong decency, the vigour, gusto, and

ebullience of the Early Victorians; but

he charged them with a new spirit, the searching criticism of his maturer time. Browning and Ruskin had taken the same path.

But Browning was preoccupied, as Alan Eliot was, with problems which could be stated, if not solved, in the terms of old theology and old ethics, God, Duty, and Immortality: righteousness and temperance and judgement to come; and the mind of Ruskin, endowed with every gift except the gift to organize the others, was more tumultuous than the tumult in which it was involved. The deceptive lucidity of his intoxicating style displayed, or concealed, an intellect as profound, penetrating, and subtle as any that England has seen; and as fanciful, as glancing, and as wayward as the mind of a child.

But if Ruskin is all dogma and no system, Meredith's grotesque is the vehicle of a philosophy which is all system and no dogma. What, we may ask-and it is the fundamental problem at once in Meredith's

work and in all Late Victorian Ethic-what are

the duties which the conception of Being as Process imposes on those to who it has been revealed and who acknowledge no other revelation? It was not a new problem, and answers could be read in the ethereal verse of Prometheus, in the gritty prose of Harriet Martineau; more lucidly, and with an almost mystical clarity, in the closing stanzas of In Memoriam.

Perfectibility wasreturning

from the exile to which the

reign of the economists had consigned her, enriched by the experience of two absorbing generations, and heartened by their victories, with a new objective and method, the gradual improvement of the race, by the transmission of a life more and more at harmony within itself; and more and more sovereign over circumstance. But whether the end was to be reached by the segregation of finer types, or the general elevation of the community at large; whether evolution had established competition as Nature's first law, or had indicated the emergence of a moral law above itself: heredity against environment, nature against nurture: the weakening of fiber by too much help, the degeneration of tissue by not help enough: the lessons to be drawn from the progress of fifty years, and to be drawn also from their failures; it is in such roving, ranging debates as these, that the thought of England is now involved; debates which, being grounded on no acknowledged pre-misses, could issue in no accepted conclusion; explorations, rather, defining of problems, not solutions; the ideas of the future shaping themselves in the language of the past; and still set out with something of the romantic urgency of a more pious, a more confident, time.

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