Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero's marrying her is especially in the literary fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman,--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough,--he burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life,--Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I,--but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke's fault. The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.
The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one. We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the _Three Brontës_ that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have sniveled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.