As has been already hinted in one case, the chorus of praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quite unchequered.

It has been objected both to Mr.Meredith and to Mr.Hardy that there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally in the later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced--the note of a certain _perversity_--of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in style, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in general attitude.

And with this has been connected--not in their cases with any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard to some of their followers--a suggestion that this "perversity" is the note of a waning period--that just as the excessive desire to be _like_ all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive desire to be _unlike_ everything else is the note of Romantic degeneration.
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.