nding life as alone giving man elbow-room, so to speak,
for working out his destiny. Browning claims eternity as the due of
every man, however mean; and if Whitman feels his foothold 'tenon'd and
mortised in granite', it is because he can 'laugh at dissolution' and
knows 'the amplitude of time'.

But in such insistence and such conviction they have not been followed,
speaking broadly, by our leading writers since. On the other hand, they
have been so followed, again speaking broadly, in their loyalty to the
twofold ideal. Here and there, no doubt, as I have said, writers like
Nietzsche, on the one hand, have tried to be satisfied with the splendid
development of a Few, or, on the other hand, like Tolstoy, have flung
back in a kind of despair to the old ideal of abnegation, of sheer
brotherly love and nothing else, turning their backs on all splendours
of art, knowledge, or delight, that do not directly minister to the one
thing they hold needful. But the earlier and wider ideal, the ideal of
our Renascence, once envisaged by man, that has not been lost, and I
believe never can be lost. Its own greatness will keep the foremost men
true to it. Meredith is one of the men I mean. He is full of pity, but
he does not only pity men and women--he wants them to grow, and to grow
for themselves. His whole attitude towards Woman shows this: for the
women's movement is nothing more and nothing less, as Ibsen also felt,
than one big stream of the general movement towards liberty and
self-determination. So far Meredith marches with Browning and Whitman.
But he will never commit himself about immortality. It seems enough for
him to take part in the struggle for a finer life, at once heroic and
tender, not caring overmuch whether we reach it or no. 'Spirit raves not
for a goal' is one of his hard and characteristic sayings, and here he
seems to me typical both of modern thought in general and especially of
English thought, and that both for good and ill. We see in him the want
of precision, the lack of logical coherence, that have prevented us from
ever producing a philosopher of the first rank. At the same time there
is something true and profound in his instinct that the moment has not
yet come in which to formulate our faith. We all feel that we are on the
brink of tremendous, perhaps terrifying, discoveries; we resent any
cut-and-dried solution, however pleasant, perhaps all the more if it is
pleasant, and we resent it because we fe