door of society the wasted possibilities of a Godolphin. No one before Meredith could have made the thwarted career of a Beauchamp a pitiful satire on "his indifferent England," who appeared, "with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of our hero's character in the domestic circle: perhaps a faintly outlined circle or two beyond it."[1]
In Society and the State all opposition is necessarily factional, for none can stand entirely outside. This was true of the Church also, during its undisputed supremacy, when to be excommunicated was equivalent to being imprisoned or otherwise put outside the pale. But by the sixteenth century Skelton could say in Colyn Clout,
"For, as farre as I can se,
It is wrong with eche degre;
For the temporalte
Accuseth the spiritualte;
The spirituall agayne
Dothe grudge and complayne
Upon the temporall men:"
By the eighteenth, Voltaire could get a hearing, albeit a hostile and scandalized one. And by the nineteenth, we have not only Brontë and Kingsley censuring from within, but Meredith and Butler from without. So far as there is a new note in the censure, it is in harmony with the whole strain of the time. For the old crude gibes against the old crude faults of hypocrisy, sensuality, and greed, is substituted the criticism that a huge organization fails
- ↑ Beauchamp's Career, 40.
