al distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of
the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its
own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the
European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland
of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more
unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played
a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of
all.

It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence of
the great women writers that explains another very arresting and
important fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. It
had been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and by
public opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certain
verbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be what
some would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not,
properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more or
less business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw the
line at literal physical description of things socially concealed. It
was originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream of
purifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed
very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their
shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively
horrible--as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as
the _OEdipus_ or _The Cenci_. None of these great men would have
tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur
censors talk to artists to-day) about "wholesome" topics and suggestions
"that cannot elevate." They had to describe the great battle of good and
evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian
compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the
stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have
claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his
purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest
doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why
he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the
secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one
who had read Thackeray's version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan's.
But though