Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the alternative.  Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never arises.  But this is exceedingly rare.  On the other hand, many mediocre authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens.  Such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness.  Of nearly all really original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads with the public—­as an almost inevitable consequence of their originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise acutely exists.

George Meredith was such an artist.  George Meredith before anything else was a poet.  He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I believe that he thought so.  The public did not care for his poetry.  If he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said:  “I shall keep on writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do it.”  But when he was only thirty-three—­a boy, as authors go—­he had already tired of no-compromise.  He wrote to Augustus Jessopp:  “It may be that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....  The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and life, one’s affections are divided....  And in truth, being a servant of the public, I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously to singing.” (Vol.  I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something else, less to his taste, that will be read.  The same sentiment has actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent....  So much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer to do because it is not appreciated by the public.

There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the public appreciates it—­otherwise the pot-boiler.  In 1861 Meredith wrote to Mrs Ross:  “I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to do this,” i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol.  I., p. 52.) Oh, base compromise!  Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L.  Stevenson:  “Of potboilers let none speak.  Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight.” (Vol.  I., p. 291.) It may be said that Meredith was forced to write potboilers.  He was no more forced to write potboilers than any other author.  Sooner than wallow in that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways.