In fifty years' time will any one read Herbert Spencer? Or Lord Acton?[54] It was stated at the time of George Meredith's death that his executors refused for him the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey because one of them believed that in a hundred years' time he would be unread; his admirers are even now divided over the question whether he was a great novelist who wrote less great poetry or a great poet who wrote less great novels. The same fate lies ahead of Thomas Hardy. Battle has already been joined over the body of Henry James: to one school he is the great analytical psychologist who revolutionised novel-writing, the perfect artist, the subtile craftsman with the inimitably personal style; to another he is the pretentious, untidy amateur, the man who never learned to select or to compress, the pompous pet of a Chelsea group, the windy impostor with thumbs for fingers who partially buried under involution his lack of style and his ignorance of punctuation. One school swears by "the novels of the middle period"; another harks back to _Roderick Hudson_; a third prays _The Turn of the Screw_ in aid and proclaims him less a novelist than a master of the short story; one of the three most highly esteemed living English novelists likens him to an elephant trying to pick up peas with its trunk; and he was decorated with the Order of Merit. What hardly any one will do is to suspend judgement; and the first business of literary society is to ensure that judgement shall not be suspended. Not only has a label to be fixed, but the humblest amateur feels obliged to say whether it was rightly fixed: praise and proscription are bandied among those who have hardly learned to read and those who have never been trained to think. When the Henry James cult became fashionable, he received equally rapt devotion from those who disliked him, from those who did not understand him and from those who had not read him. James was elevated into a literary standard; he collected a following of disciples; those who flattered him by imitation were flattered in turn by his frank approval. The bellow of the herd drowned the voice of the individual. In all the calendar of critical crime there is no more soul-destroying dishonesty than a second-hand opinion. IV The same premature labelling may be seen in "musical London" with the appearance of every new composer and the exhumation of every old score. While Verdi is tolerated and Gounod deplored, Ravel is--at the moment--a safe winner, and a liking for Delius commands respect, Debussy holds his own; Richard Strauss is still a bone of friendly contention; de Lara and Ethel Smyth are encouraged as British composers by a perplexed audience which has been taught to distrust British compositions; but "musical London" has decided that it is time for a reaction against Puccini.