freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of
the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. But
justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished,
and sealed as a whole--till the _ne varietur_ and _ne plus ultra_ of
death have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more general
judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty
in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if
it be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our
three excepted cases. 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