son, a palace. Three days of filth and discomfort, if not of actual privations, three nights of jolting and bumping and occasional capsizing, had to be endured before the 137 miles between Figueira and the capital were covered. Small wonder that those surviving to tell the tale look down with disdain on latter-day tourists who boast of "roughing it" in Norway or Tirol. Comparatively luxurious was the journey to Coimbra, for it was made up the river by boat, a kind of barge with a layer of straw to supply the lack of seats and little tilted covers over bow and stern, under which the passengers would creep when the sun blazed down too fiercely. Nowadays, while the "expresses" actually accomplish something like twenty-five miles an hour, even the ordinary trains will take you to Coimbra in an hour and a quarter. In my aunt's girlhood the whole day had to be spent in poling up the river. Sometimes the low vessel would run ashore, and then, what shoving and hauling to get her along through sand and mud! Provisions of food and drink had to be taken on these occasions-not too little, or else the ebb of the returning tide, leaving you stranded in an unsuspected shallow, might compel an involuntary fast, but also not too much, or else you had to do battle with the Guarda Fiscal (octroi officers) who would come down tooth and nail on the arriving barges. These duties were perforce executed amid the laughter of the students of Coimbra, who, traditionally hatless and in their picturesque cloaks (which, though without beggar's wallet of the original scholar, have survived even unto our day), made it their business to criticize all the strange faces that came and I went in the city of Portuguese light and learning. Occasionally it was to Oporto or, to speak more correctly, Porto-that the family migration took place. There was not, at this time, a

single hackney carriage in the capital of Northern Portugal, and when my aunt and her contemporaries went out to dances, they were conveyed in sedan chairs. No more comfortable mode of transport was ever devised, Donna Emilia avers, and they would appear to be not entirely démodé even yet. Antiquated "sedans" are still to be found in Lisbon, prolonging a decrepit existence under the patronage of the aged and infirm. Little conducive to neighborliness could those far-away days have been-when my grandfather's smart English landau had to be "horsed" by bullocks, so bad were the roads that no animal less sturdy could be expected to face them; and when the clearing of a track to make it just possible for wheels was often a necessary preliminary to paying a friendly call. There was, however, less reason to bemoan the lack of macadam in a land where all the world was at home in the saddle. To fair or to market, to church or to the beach to bathe from one of the tents that gaveand still give-such an air of military occupation to the strip of yellow sands, all sorts and conditions of men-and women-jog-trotted on pony, mule, or donkey-back. Time was, and not so long ago either, when the guests bidden to a wedding (among the conservative the ceremony still takes place at midnight, though fashion now decrees a daylight hour) assembled on their steeds to meet the bride and bridegroom, who, with their padrinhos and madrinhas-the spiritual godfathers and godmothers required by the old Portuguese ritual-arrived at the church door in similar fashion. And it is as Donna Emilia laments with many an aï, aï, a sign of the degeneracy of the present day that the Senhor Medico no longer comes on his trusty ass to feel our pulses and inspect our tongues, but, so grand has the world become, must needs drive up in his trap, or

even, maybe, expect a carriage to be sent for him!

Ai di me! The old order changeth and giveth place to the new, but it lingers long in this distant corner of Europe, The Cornhill Magazine.

and Portugal still presents many a quaint picture of the past, often redolent of an old-world charm and always full of interest and instruction. Constance Leigh Clare.

In the current number of an excellent weekly paper there appeared a letter on the subject of Meredith and Dickens, which is very typical of all that we must throw off in the modern world or perish. Why anybody should want to compare Meredith and Dickens any more than Hesiod and Thackeray, I do not know. But the letter was to this effect; tha Dickens could not really be a great artist, because in his books one could divide men into good and bad; and with Meredith, it was alleged (very unjustly) one could not do this. There could be no stronger case of that strange fanaticism which fills our time; the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality. The writer did not contend that the men of Dickens were incredibly good or incredibly bad; he admitted that many of the villains had virtues and that nearly all of the virtuous men had weaknesses. He objected to the books simply because they recognized a rough essential division between villains and virtuous people. It did not seem to strike him that everybody does recognize this in daily life. It did not occur to him to go and ask workmen whether there is such a thing as a bad master; or women whether there is such a thing as a bad husband; or tradesmen whether there is such a thing as a bad debt. Still less did it occur to him to ask the experience of all mankind, and all the books that have been written on the earth, whether there is not such a thing as a bad man. Not a lost man,

not a predestinately damned man, not a man without any possible merits: but a bad man, different from a good man by marks as plain as those which separate a dark man from a fair man. Vice and virtue do shade into each other in every character; tallness and shortness are only a matter of degree. But to blame Dickens for describing Boythorne as good and Quilp as bad is to complain of him for stating that Boythorne was tall and Quilp rather short.

The above outburst of somewhat elementary truth is more relevant than may at first appear; because this attempt to condemn all working moral judgments in fiction was made the instrument of an eulogy upon Meredith. Meredith, it was suggested, exhibited his characters not only as compounded of good and evil, but always, I presume, compounded of them (by some strange coincidence) in equal quantities. Meredith did not offer good people or bad people, but merely people; live animals to be considered scientifically and (I suppose) coldly, without reference to any high crisis of the conscience or wars between heaven and hell. That was the claim made for Meredith.

This being so, it is plain that Meredith, like Browning, must be rescued from his admirers. And there could hardly be a better end to begin at than this simple matter of the allegation about ethics. It is an atrocious libel upon Meredith to say that he was scientific or purely psychological or even

purely æsthetic.

It is a black slander

to say that he did not preach, or that his characters are not properly placarded as good and bad. They are; just as much and just as little as in Dickens or any other writer whose books it is endurable to read. Books without morality in them are books that send one to sleep standing up. Meredith at least was not of that sort; he was complex but quite the reverse of colorless. His convictions may have been right or wrong; but they were very burning convictions. What can that man have meant by saying that his characters are not good men and bad men? He might quite as well have said it about Bunyan. Is not Dacier a bad man; a man whose badness tones the whole pivot of the tale? Is not Redworth a good man, introduced into the tale in order to be good? Is he not much more a mere symbol of virtus or virile virtue than half Dickens's good men, like Pickwick or Boffin, who are comparatively accidental? Are there no ethical sympathies in "Harry Richmond"; no political sympathies in "Vittoria"? But the most famous case is, of course, the most crushing of all. Meredith did what Dickens never did. He wrote a Morality; a pure and stern satiric allegory for the lashing of one special vice. The Egoist is not a man; he is a sin. And, as in all the old and wholesome Moralities of the ages of faith, the object of fixing the vice on one man is really to fix it upon all men. We have all posed with the Egoist, just as we have all fallen with Adam. There is no character in Dickens which is symbolic and moral in that extreme sense and degree. Micawber is not Improvidence, Sikes is not Brutality in the utterly naked and abstract sense in which Sir Willoughby Patterne is Selfishness.

There never were any artists just as there never were any agnostics. The

artist had always an ethos up his sleeve; just as the agnostic always really concealed a cosmos about his person. The real assumption of the vaguest mid-Victorian was not that he did not know, but that he knew better. And the real view of the most violent French decadent was not that morals were indifferent, but that it was highly immoral that he should be prevented from keeping fifteen mistresses and au opium pipe. It is not about the existence of obligations that men have ever differed; it is about their nature; as in those unhappy religious differences which still divide Christians from Thugs. And what is interesting about Meredith is not that he did not recognize right and wrong; the village idiot must do that; but what things he thought right and what wrong, and how far he differed from the current conceptions of his society. He left the world in comparatively little doubt about these things, except in so far as his mere mode of expression was dubious or indirect. Fantastic as he was, he was a fighter; and when you have understood a Meredith sentence you will generally find it is a stab.

Meredith is at least as much of a controversial moralist as Mr. Thomas Hardy and, one may be permitted to add, a much nicer one. Mr. Hardy is always classed with Meredith according to those indistinct notions of liberality and advancement which are the confusion of modern thinking; but Hardy and Meredith are, in fact, almost typical antagonists. Mr. Hardy's stories always have a moral; and the moral is that morality has an uncommonly rotten chance of it. The universe is made in some dark way a separate entity which upsets the plans of blameless and pathetic human beings. God is the villain in Mr. Hardy's novels; God behaves extraordinarily badly considering that He does not exist. This queer and irritated attempt to fix

personal responsibility upon an impersonal force is a little bit shaky in logic; but it produces a genuine and passionate though an evil atmosphere in art. But Meredith, though in no way orthodox, is the very antithesis of all this. That impersonal deity which is Hardy's villain is Meredith's hero and champion. Nature betrays all the heroines of Hardy. Nature enters to save all the heroines of Meredith. The argument of Hardy is that human beings with their brief joy and brittle ideals might get on very well if the general wave of the world did not overturn them or smash them into sticks. The argument of Meredith is that our little lives always stagnate into hypocrisy or morbidity, unless the general wave of the world continually refreshes and recreates us. Hardy maintains that man is a mere game of the gods. 'Meredith, on the other hand, maintains that the gods are a necessity of man. He prefers to say the gods rather than God; but that is a 19th century prejudice.

Woman always appears in Meredith as a goddess in this strict and special sense; that she appears as something which is akin in some way to the essence of the universe. She is above reason rather than below it; and her caprice is not like the caprice of weakness but rather like the caprice of omnipotence. His celebrated sentence, "Women will be the last thing civilized by man" has been much quoted; far too much, because it does not really do justice to his position. It is not Meredithian, because it is neither pessimist nor optimist. It is almost insolently masculine to suppose that man must try to civilize woman; and it is revoltingly pessimistic to suppose that he will ever succeed. Still the phrase contains a hint of his feeling about the mildness and mystery of the other sex, which were in a manner his religion.

Since Christianity broke the heart of the world and mended it one cannot really be a Pagan; one can only be an anti-Christian. But subject to this deeper difficulty Meredith came much nearer to being a real Pagan than any of the other moderns for whom the term has been claimed. Swinburne was not a Pagan in the least; he was a pseudo-Parisian pessimist. Thomas Hardy is not a Pagan; he is a Nonconformist gone sour. It is not Pagan to revile the gods nor is it Pagan to exalt a street-walker into a symbol of all possible pleasure. The Pagan felt that there was a sort of easy and equable force pressing upon us from Nature; that this force was breezy and beneficent, though not specially just or loving; in other words, that there was, as the strength in wine or trees or the ocean, the energy of kindly but careless gods. This Paganism is now impossible, either to the Christian or the sceptic. We believe so much less than that-and we desire so much more. But no man in our time ever came quite so near to this clean and wellpoised Paganism as Meredith. He took the mystery of the universe lightly; and waited for the gods to show themselves in the forest. We talk of the curiosity of the Greeks; but there is also something almost eerie about their lack of curiosity. There is a wide gulf between the gay unanswered questions of Socrates and the parched and passionate questions of Job. Theirs was at least a light curiosity, a curiosity of the head; and it seems a sort of mockery to those Christians or unbelievers who now explore the universe with the tragic curiosity of the heart. Meredith almost catches this old pre-Christian levity; this spirit that can leave the gods alone even when it believes in them. He had neither the brighter nor the darker forms of spiritual inquiry or personal religion. He could neither rise to

prayer nor sink to spirit-rapping. Yet he was a religious Pagan (there were very few irreligious Pagans) because he had that great and central sacramental idea which is the one thing which marks religion from all imitations of religions or false definitions of it. It is the thing which is in all things that are religions, Brahminism, or Mormonism, or Catholicism, or Thuggee, or Devil-worship; but which is not in any of the things that merely pretend to be religious, such as Ethical Societies or Higher Thought Centres. This element can only be called the materialism of the true mystic. Those who do not like it call it fetishworship. It is the idea that to enter upon abstractions and infinities is to get further and further from the mystery; to come near some particular stone or flame or boundary is to get nearer and nearer to the mystery. All unsophisticated human beings instinctively accept the sacramental principle that the particular thing is closest to the general, the tangible thing closest to the spiritual; the child with a doll, the priest with a relic, the girl with an engagement ring, the soldier with a medal, the modern agnostic with his little scarab for luck. One can recall the soul of boyhood better by smelling peppermint than by reading about adolescence; one could talk for hours about a person's identity and still jump on hearing his voice; and it is possible for Putney to be a much more pathetic word than Memory. I have heard modern people talk of the needlessness of all the old rituals and reliquaries and the need for a simple religion of the heart. But their demand is rather dangerous, especially to themselves. If we really had a simple religion of the heart we should all be loaded with relics, and rituals would be going on all day long. If our creed were only of the higher emotions, it would talk of nothing else but special

shrines, sacred spots, indispensable gestures, and adorable rags and bones. In short, a religion of pure good feeling would be a positive orgy of superstition. This seems to me excessive; I prefer a little clean theology to keep the thing within bounds. But the thing itself is the essence of genuine religion; every genuine mystic, even the diabolist, adores something material. In short, both the mystic and the mere philosopher agree that the spiritual is more important than the material considered in itself. But the philosopher thinks that the spiritual lies very far beyond the material, like a remote landmark behind a plain. But the mystic thinks that the spiritual is very close behind the material, like a brigand hiding behind a bush. Science is always saying that the other world, if it exists, is too distant to be seen. Religion is always saying that it is too close to be seen. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Meredith in this deep sense is a mystic, though perhaps a Pagan mystic. He is a mystic in so far that he is a materialist. In all his work there is: the smell and taste of things; it is grass and not the ghost of grass; fire and not the shadow of fire; beer and not the chemical analysis of beer. Nothing is so fine in Meredith as the satisfying solidity of everything. The wind in which Clara Middleton walked is a real wind; the reader can feel it in his hair. The wine which Dr. Middleton drank is a real wine; the reader can get drunk on it. It is true that Meredith, when one does not understand him, appears like a bewildering filagree or a blinding spider's web; but this is a question of the difficulty of finding his meaning, not of what it is like when found. Meredith's language is indefensibly intricate; but it is Meredith's language, not Meredith. It is as if someone were saying something quite hearty and sensible in Hebrew.