disqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attests
itself. You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline or
fail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is _first_. In
Balzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it is
there to some extent and even to a large one: or they would not be the
great writers that they are, or great writers at all. But it is not
merely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly and in
parts of others, or accompanied, as in Swift and others still, by
companions not invariably acceptable. It is to a certain extent
adulterated, sophisticated, made not so much the helpmeet, or the
willing handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt. I do not know
how early criticism, which now seems to have got hold of the fact,
noticed the strong connection-contrast between Dickens and Meredith: but
it must always have been patent to some. The contrast is of course the
first to strike:--the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque,
of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utter
absence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it in
Meredith--divers other differences of the same general kind. But to any
one reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit,
kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to be
different," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, and
probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not
anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ actually worked.

"Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac,
and of Meredith are not impossible worlds: for the only worlds which are
impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of
these is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" which
are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not with