There was also no lack of newer comers.  Mr. Meredith had been writing for some dozen years:  and though he had achieved no general popularity, though even critics might make reserves as to points in his procedure, there could be no competent doubt of his great powers.  Mr. Blackmore had made his late beginning some time before:  and had just caught the public ear unmistakably with Lorna Doone (1869).  Mr. Hardy was on the eve of catching it with the new and powerful attractions of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).  In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the Chronicles of Carlingford had seemed the promissory notes of a novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehow the bills were rather renewed than met.  Others to be noticed immediately had come or were coming on.  Let us take a little more detailed notice of them.

In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy—­not to speak of others on whom the bar still luckily rests—­the “great ox” was, until the original composition of this book was actually finished, “on the tongue” of any one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard “de vivis nil nisi necessarium.”  You may and must criticise, with as much 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.