and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if we do but
get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain Maxse, in reference
to a vast sum of L8,000 paid by the _Cornhill_ people to George Eliot
(for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this
ever happen to me?"

And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which
unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and therefore
bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. This
affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur Meredith
about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As for me, I have
failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., p.
318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. Meredith was then
fifty-three years of age. He had written _Modern Love_, _The Shaving of
Shagpat_, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Rhoda Fleming_, _The Egoist_
and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and that his
best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit that he did not
privately deem himself one of the masters of English literature and
destined to what we call immortality. He had the enthusiastic
appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. And yet, "As for
me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." But
he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor
in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. He had failed
only in one thing--immediate popularity.

II

Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate
popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard
plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. Ought he to limit
himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do
something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of
obtaining popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider nothing
but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided solely by my own
personal conception of what the public ought to like"? Or ought he to
say: "Let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise
between us is not possible"?

Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the
alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately
constituted and so b