sex, and
of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes. She is a
modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to
the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by
Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is
the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is
that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and
through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de
convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein
admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts;
finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried
friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that,
like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit
onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring,
splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we
get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in
the development of society. He has an intense conviction that
the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall
back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her
"intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of
sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be
civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than
against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a
creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the
sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the
sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a
stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized
in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works
abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed
before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that
he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will
recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that
they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The
mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of
feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary
dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of
reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to
social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting
aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances. In both
"Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he
advocates a greater freedo