ositive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the
sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.
If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where
death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel
their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is
really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the
Victorian time) the differences between human beings become
overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures
of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.

This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _Canterbury
Tales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel.
The characters there are at once graphically and delicately
differentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, his
coldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh that
it recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;
the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub's, the children
fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red
hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a
door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the
Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is
nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great
difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendennis
would never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer's knight rode
with a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seeking
together was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers
and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the
shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis
and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the
butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess
d'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,
laughing and telling tales together?

The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an
increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest
in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been
done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense
interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather
increased soci