opinion, he approaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other and greater artistic creators:  while in one of these points he stands aloof even from these two, and occupies a position—­not altogether to his advantage—­altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation.  All the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare—­one might even go farther back and, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais—­are, even in extravaganza, in parody, in what you please, at once pre-eminently and prima facie natural and human.  To every competent human judgment, as soon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individual disqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attests itself.  You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline or fail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is first.  In Balzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first.  Of course it is there to some extent and even to a large one:  or they would not be the great writers that they are, or great writers at all.  But it is not merely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly and in parts of others, or accompanied, as in Swift and others still, by companions not invariably acceptable.  It is to a certain extent adulterated, sophisticated, made not so much the helpmeet, or the willing handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt.  I do not know how early criticism, which now seems to have got hold of the fact, noticed the strong connection-contrast between Dickens and Meredith:  but it must always have been patent to some.  The contrast is of course the first to strike:—­the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque, of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utter absence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it in Meredith—­divers other differences of the same general kind.  But to any one reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit, kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious “to be different,” starting too with Dickens’s example before him, might, and probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel actually worked.

“Extra- not anti-” that is the key.  The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac, and of Meredith are not impossible worlds:  for the only worlds which are impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of these is that.  Something has been said of the “four dimensions” which are necessary to work Dickens’s world, and our business here is not with Balzac’s.  But something must now be said of the fourth dimension—­some would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions—­which is or are required to put Mr. Meredith’s in working order.  I do not myself think that more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that if Mohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged to endow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the reduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will have to proceed.  There will be great joy in that other world when he has done it:  and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say that no one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.