Arnold Bennett declared that "Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England," he was merely following the twentieth century fad of depreciating the nineteenth,—any smart miss of sixteen being naturally more modern and sophisticated than her middle-aged mother. But in saying that "The death of George Meredith removes, not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern school," he mentions an obvious fact, not really discredited by the chronological situation. This does not necessarily argue, be it said, that Meredith casts the forward shadow of coming events. His strong individuality did not lend itself to imitation, or even a prompt appreciation. Moreover, he had in him no germ either of fin de siècle decadence or of its flaunting iconoclasm. In his own mountain range he is simply a preëminent peak, as in theirs were Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson.
As to the lower plateaus and the foothills, the only thing of interest that develops through examining their juxtaposition, is the resultant effect on Thackeray. While the others stand firmly up to their own normal height, making no attempt to add a cubit to their stature, he seems constantly to be taking thought; nor is it thought that leads to conclusions of much moment. "His depth," like Lytton's, "is fathomable," but his air is of the most profound and meditative. It must be this, together with his Snobs and Vanity Fair (to both of which, acknowledgments are due) that has bewitched his critics and persuaded his readers into ranking him as the foremost Victorian satirist. That he is among the elect is undeniable, even to being "more long-winded than Horace and bitterer than Juvenal,"[1] but to place him above
- ↑ Cecil Headlam, in his Introduction to Selections from the British Satirists.
