always very congruously arranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and the People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest?  A palate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate thought put before it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires to be stung or puzzled into thinking, may derive some advantage.  But are these exactly the tastes and appetites that should be accepted as arbiters?

Again, partly through this perpetual mirage and steam-cloud of style, partly by other methods, Mr. Meredith manages, with consummate cleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character and story in the same extra-natural way.  Take the rick-burning at the beginning of Feverel; take the famous wine scene (a very fascinating one, though I never heard anywhere else, in some researches on the subject, of port that would keep ninety years) in The Egoist.  The things may have happened this way in some Georgium Sidus, where the Comic Spirit has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension:  but that is not the way they happen here.  The Wise Youth, Diana, Edward Blancove, Roy Richmond—­but why begin a list which would never end?—­are inhabitants of the same region.  They are not impossible:  they could be translated into actual tellurian beings, which the men and women of the bad novelist never can be.  But at present they are not translated:  and you must know a special language, in a wide sense, in order to translate them.  I do not say that the language is impossible or even very hard to learn:  but it is required.  And Meredithians say you ought to learn it.  An extremely respectable book of reference before me rebukes “those who lack the intelligence and sensibility that can alone admit them to the charmed circle of appreciative readers” and who “have not patience to apply themselves to the study of the higher fiction with the same ardour that they think necessary in the case of any other art.”

Now “Fudge!” is a rude word:  but I fear we must borrow it from Goldsmith’s hero, and apply it here.  As for “charmed circles” there is uncommonly good company outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may “be as merry as the day is long,” so that the Comic Spirit cannot entirely disdain us.  And as for art—­the present writer will fight for its claims as long as he has breath.  But the proof of the art of the novelist is that—­at first hand or very shortly—­he “enfists,” absorbs, delights you.  You may discover secrets of his art afterwards with much pleasure and profit:  but the actual first-hand delight is the criterion.  There ought to be no need of sitting down before the thing with tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe; of mustering crucibles and reagents like assayers at some doubtful and recalcitrant piece of ore.  Now these not very adept defenders of Mr. Meredith seem to assert that these processes are desirable in any case, and necessary in his.  As a matter of fact the necessity is not omnipresent:  but it is present far too frequently.  It is the first duty of the novelist to “let himself be read”—­anything else that he gives you is a bonus, a trimming, a dessert.