Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty, they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed, with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman, rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled. The defenders of Meredith will say that he does not desire such a state of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and death of art--surely he would have found space in his many novels for at least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have succeeded. I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it for granted that the novelist must be joking.