This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the
participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an
important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was
certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between
the rich _bourgeoisie_ and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,
for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people
down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere
in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by
the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was
limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:
yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say
it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in
it. It was always saying solidly that things were "enough"; and proving
by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not
enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its
emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that in
the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if
I call it George Eliot.

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons
already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian
Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end
of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian
time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds--or
perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as
Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity
does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name
also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and
largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;
as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite