Pessimism, to be consistent, would express itself in terms of tragedy. Out of approximately one hundred Victorian novels of the realistic type,--for romantic tragedy cannot be taken as an index of the writer’s philosophy,--less than ten per cent can be classified as tragic in outcome; and in none of these is the catastrophe inclusive, overwhelming, or a perversion of justice. Of these the largest proportion belongs to Eliot and Meredith, but _The Mill on the Floss_ is the solitary complete tragedy. _Rhoda Fleming_ and _Middlemarch_ are almost as truly tales of comic tragedians as _Romola_, _Richard Feverel_, and _An Amazing Marriage_ are of tragic comedians. On the other hand, tragedy of this mitigated sort is not inconsistent with idealism, which in turn is the constructive side of criticism. While it is too much, as Lytton reminds us in _Kenelm Chillingly_, to expect both critical and constructive ability to be conspicuous in the same individual, nevertheless the criticism which is content to note a deflection from an ideal without even a tacit recognition of the ideal deflected from, is mere childish fretting over the personally irritating. Of this there is little in the nineteenth century. The Victorians may have had some of the unpardonable disregard for reality of which they have been accused,[407] but they never could be accused of a disregard for ideality. None of the novelists, indeed, announced an ecstatic premonition of some far-off, divine event toward which the whole creation moves; but they would all have asserted, even if under their breath,--_Eppur si muove_. This assertion is none the less emphatic and possibly the more artistic, by being made indirectly, through dramatic presentation of characters. Harley L’Estrange, Egremont, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Brandon, Mark Tapley, Sidney Carton, Mr. Eden, Jane Eyre, Alton Locke, Mr. Harding, Dinah Morris, Dorothea Brooke, Austin Feverel, Vittoria, Beauchamp,--these all testify in their various ways, by noble aspiration, generous self-effacement, sensitive response to duty, devotion to principle, courage in daring and in endurance, to the existence of a something in the human soul that is stemming the tide of its selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty, and may in time work out a salvation for the race.