Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish this somewhat didactic chat.  You will admit that I have never prosed so much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage it.  I skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky methods.  And I skip Miss Burney’s novels, as being feminine reflections of the great masters who had just preceded her.  But Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” surely deserves one paragraph to itself.  There is a book which is tinged throughout, as was all Goldsmith’s work, with a beautiful nature.  No one who had not a fine heart could have written it, just as no one without a fine heart could have written “The Deserted Village.”  How strange it is to think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the shrinking Irishman, when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama the latter has proved himself far the greater man.  But here is an object-lesson of how the facts of life may be treated without offence.  Nothing is shirked.  It is all faced and duly recorded.  Yet if I wished to set before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would prepare her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as “The Vicar of Wakefield.”

So much for the eighteenth-century novelists.  They have a shelf of their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain.  For years you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word or train of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them and love them, and rejoice that you know them.  But let us pass to something which may interest you more.

If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists with the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George Meredith would come out very low indeed.  If, on the other hand, a number of authors were convened to determine which of their fellow-craftsmen they considered the greatest and the most stimulating to their own minds, I am equally confident that Mr. Meredith would have a vast preponderance of votes.  Indeed, his only conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy.  It becomes an interesting study, therefore, why there should be such a divergence of opinion as to his merits, and what the qualities are which have repelled so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose opinion must be allowed to have a special weight.

The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality.  The public read to be amused.  The novelist reads to have new light thrown upon his art.  To read Meredith is not a mere amusement; it is an intellectual exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you develop your thinking powers.  Your mind is in a state of tension the whole time that you are reading him.