Read it through once

Lastly, I said at the outset that I would ask you to accord to novelists the recognition of their place as artists. But after what has been said, I feel that to urge this further would be only a repetition of what has gone before. Therefore, though not all who write novels can reach the first, or even the second, rank, wherever you find good and faithful work, with truth, sympathy, and clearness of purpose, I pray you to give the author of that work the praise as to an Artist--an Artist like the rest--the praise that you so readily accord to the earnest student of any other Art. As for the great Masters of the Art--Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Victor Hugo--I, for one, feel irritated when the critics begin to appraise, compare, and to estimate them: there is nothing, I think, that we can give them but admiration that is unspeakable, and gratitude that is silent. This silence proves more eloquently than any words how great, how beautiful an Art is that of Fiction.