rilliantly endowed that he captures the public at
once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never
arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation
in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any
problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. Such authors
enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. Of nearly all really
original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads
with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their
originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise
acutely exists.

George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before anything else
was a poet. He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I
believe that he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If
he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually
have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "I shall keep on
writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do
it." But when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had
already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be
that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....
The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and
life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of
the public, _I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
to singing_." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of
writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something
else, less to his taste, that will be read. The same sentiment has
actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including
Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So
much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
to do because it is not appreciated by the public.

There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the
public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote
to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to
do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh,
base compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson: "Of
potboilers let non