If, on the other hand, you are indifferent to whether you are convinced by what you read and care little with what you occupy your spare time and desire to fill up your hours with an occupation calling for as little mental concentration as, say, a game of golf, I dare say you could agreeably narcotize yourself still with _Rob Roy_ or _The Tower of London_ or _The Woman in White_ or, say, _Rudder Grange_. CHAPTER FOUR TO JOSEPH CONRAD Thus in Mid-Victorian years there established itself for all the world to see--The English Nuvvle. And inasmuch as this phenomenon was really, in the last event, combined--and no doubt unconscious--socio-political propaganda, it was accepted by the whole world--and by the whole world even more than by England. For if, as it were, you shut your eyes and consider what images are brought up before you by the words The English Novel you will see a Manor House, inhabited by the Best People: Sir Thomas, amiable but not bright; Lady Charlotte, benevolent, charitable, in an ample crinoline, an Earl’s daughter; the Misses Jean and Charlotte as pure as dew within lily-chalices; Mr. Tom--not absolutely satisfactory; Mr. Edward, always satisfactory; pigeons, shorthorns, a rose-garden, a still-room, a housekeeper, a rectory. And you will see a whole countryside, a whole continent, a whole world so conducted that those amiable but not bright personages shall lead amiable, idle, and almost blameless existences in an atmosphere of curtsyings and cap-touchings. It was a world-ideal: you found households modelling themselves upon it in the Government of Kiev, in the State of Massachusetts, in Pomerania, in the department of the Var. So that God’s Englishman of the novels of William Black--God’s drooping-bearded Englishman with his crinolined or be-bustled consort, carrying fly-fishing rods and croquet mallets, became the type which the whole world sighingly aped. For these nuvvles--to which nobody surely could object--were read in Sarajevo as in Potsdam, in Washington as on the Berkshire downs. They were works written for the would-be gentry by the near-gentry which latter, if their books proved sufficiently acceptable, might almost aspire to such establishments as they described and, in the second generation, to authentic gentrydom. The writer himself, like Shakespeare, would as a rule have to content himself with a grant of arms from the College of Heralds. But one could always, if one were a novelist, dazzle one’s mind with the idea that Edward Bulwer Lytton, author of _The Last Days of Pompeii_, became successively Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lord, Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli, also a novelist, Earl of Beaconsfield and favourite of his Sovereign.