accepted, there is no way to shake him off.
The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once
republican and free. You resent the domination, but you enjoy it too,
and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery.

Rhoda Fleming.

_Rhoda Fleming_ is one of the least known of the novels, and in a sense
it is one of the most disagreeable. To the general it has always been
caviare, and caviare it is likely to remain; for the general is before
all things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon the
superstitions of respectability as _Rhoda Fleming_ has been written. And
besides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages too
elementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignant
and too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They care
for no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is not
restrained. It irks them to grapple with problems capable of none save a
tragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temper
with things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, of
human nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in the
outcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for them
whose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials as
character largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply felt
and poignantly expressed there is such a feast in _Rhoda Fleming_ as no
other English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is full
of failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who is
such a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; who
suggests (with some other of Mr. Meredith's creations) a close,
deliberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens: a writer
with whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, and
who, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost be
described as the other's evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool,
of whom his author is so bitterly contemptuous that he is never once
permitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever and who,
though he bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil of _Tom
Jones_ is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical
mode of presentation as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously to
imperil the reality of the story. And, last