There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. Meredith nor Mr. Hardy on the whole; though it may supply a not altogether wholesome temptation to some readers to admire them for the wrong things, and may interpose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full and frank enjoyment by others.  The intellectual power and the artistic skill which have been shown in the long series that has followed The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic—­and in fact annul his jurisdiction—­if he fails to admire them; while in some cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and not trivial delight has been given by them to generations of novel readers.  Above all, it may be said of both these veterans that they have held the standard high, that—­in Mr. Meredith’s case more specially and for a longer preliminary period, but virtually in both—­they have had to await the taste for their work:  and that in awaiting it they have never stooped for one moment to that dastardly and degrading change of sail to catch the popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse of politics and of literature—­the two chief worldly occupations and ends of the mind of man—­that they have been and are artists who wait till the world comes to them, and not artisans who haunt the market places to hire themselves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or even bate their price to suit the hirer.  If it were possible to judge the literary value of a period by its best representatives—­which is exactly what is not possible—­then the period 1870-1908 might, as far as novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, “These are mine; what does it matter what you choose to say against me?”

The foregoing remarks were actually written before Mr. Meredith’s death:  and I have thought it better to leave them exactly as they then stood with hardly any correction; but it may justly be expected that they should now be supplemented.  The history of Mr. Meredith’s career and reputation, during the half century which passed between the appearance of Richard Feverel and his death, has a certain obvious resemblance to that of Browning’s, but with some differences.  His work at once arrested attention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, cases fix it, even with critical readers:  and for a long time the general public turned an obstinately deaf ear.  He followed The Ordeal itself—­a study of very freely and deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual and always unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting epigram or rather of style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of a strange ironic persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression in the same way—­unhastingly