While the problem of freedom becomes simple for one who, like Meredith, will take this view, there are many who will not or cannot do so, and the very impossibility of the question from reason's point of view makes the path a very labyrinth for them. We all try to solve the question, and different personalities arrive at different answers; but all are partial. They vary from the logical, but dead outcome of Swinburne: "There is no bad nor good," to the struggling faith of Omar Khayyam: "The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But here or there as strikes the Player goes; And he that toss'd you down into the Field, He knows about it all--He knows--He knows." At such a time as this of ours it is especially helpful to study a writer like George Meredith, who far from ignoring the many sides of the problem, yet clings firmly to his faith in character. With no doubtful accent, he tells us that Character is the Source of Destiny. As any great writer of the day must do, Meredith accepts much in the arguments of the fatalists. He does not refuse to see that nature and circumstances are strong to mould life. He recognizes the great power of environment and the absolute power, within its realm, of heredity. Like Beowulf, like Shakespeare, like Browning, he is reverent before human destiny. Yet in spite of all this, he accepts the moral with its necessary result of freedom. He declares that, although the laws of necessity rule up to the crisis of the moral choice, that very choice sets all the laws of intellect and body working according to itself. All the stronger for his acceptance of life's necessity becomes his belief in life's freedom. All the stronger for his concessions becomes his final dictum. The more intricate the machine, the greater its master's mind. The narrower the realm of choice, the greater power must that choice have, to move life as it does. To show that the same peculiar mixture of belief in fatalism and in the determining power of character on life exists in Meredith's writings as in Beowulf and in Shakespeare, let me quote a few words from 'Evan Harrington': "Most youths, like Pope's women, have no character at all, and indeed a character that does not wait for circumstances to shape it, is of small worth in the race that must be run." Again he says: "When we have cast off the scales of hope and fancy, and surrender our claims on made chance: when the wild particles of this universe consent to march as they are directed, it is given them to see if they see at all that some plan is working out: that the heavens, icy as they are to the pangs of our blood, have been throughout speaking to our souls; and, according to the strength there existing, we learn to comprehend them."