them with uncomfortable or unfamiliar truths. The public, like the
delicate Greek Narcissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself; and the
name of its only other perfect lover is Echo. Yet even great
authors must lay their account with the public, and it is
instructive to observe how different are the attitudes they have
adopted, how uniform the disappointment they have felt. Some, like
Browning and Mr. Meredith in our own day, trouble themselves little
about the reception given to their work, but are content to say on,
until the few who care to listen have expounded them to the many,
and they are applauded, in the end, by a generation whom they have
trained to appreciate them. Yet this noble and persevering
indifference is none of their choice, and long years of absolution
from criticism must needs be paid for in faults of style. "Writing
for the stage," Mr. Meredith himself has remarked, "would be a
corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style into which some great
ones fall at times." Denied such a corrective, the great one is
apt to sit alone and tease his meditations into strange shapes,
fortifying himself against obscurity and neglect with the
reflection that most of the words he uses are to be found, after
all, in the dictionary. It is not, however, from the secluded
scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrung by the indignities
of his position, but rather from genius in the act of earning a
full meed of popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
wrote for the stage, both were blown by the favouring breath of
their plebeian patrons into reputation and a competence. Each of
them passed through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly
corner where the artist is exposed to cross fires, his own idea of
masterly work on the one hand and the necessity for pleasing the
rabble on the other. When any man is awake to the fact that the
public is a vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread