The writer of the group who has consistently gained ground and has come to be generally recognized as a great artist, a force in English fiction both for influence and pleasure-giving power, is Anthony Trollope.  He is vital to-day and strengthening his hold upon the readers of fiction.  The quiet, cultivated folk in whose good opinion lies the destiny of really worthy literature, are, as a rule, friendly to Trollope; not seldom they are devoted to him.  Such people peruse him in an enjoyably ruminative way at their meals, or read him in the neglige of retirement.  He is that cosy, enviable thing, a bedside author.  He is above all a story-teller for the middle-aged and it is his good fortune to be able to sit and wait for us at that half-way house,—­since we all arrive.  Of course, to say this is to acknowledge his limitations.  He does not appeal strongly to the young, though he never forgets to tell a love story; but he is too placid, matter-of-fact, unromantic for them.  But if he do not shake us with lyric passion, he is always interesting and he wears uncommonly well.  That his popularity is extending is testified to by new editions and publishers’ hullabaloo over his work.

Such a fate is deserved by him, for Trollope is one of the most consummate masters of that commonplace which has become the modern fashion—­and fascination.  He has a wonderful power in the realism which means getting close to the fact and the average without making them uninteresting.  So, naturally, as realism has gained he has gained.  No one except Jane Austen has surpassed him in this power of truthful portrayal, and he has the advantage of being practically of our own day.  He insisted that fiction should be objective, and refused to intrude himself into the story, showing himself in this respect a better artist than Thackeray, whom he much admired but frankly criticized.  He was unwilling to pause and harangue his audience in rotund voice after the manner of Dickens, First among modern novelists, Trollope stands invisible behind his characters, and this, as we have seen, was to become one of the articles of the modern creed of fiction.  He affords us that peculiar pleasure which is derived from seeing in a book what we instantly recognize as familiar to us in life.  Just why the pleasure, may be left to the psychologists; but it is of indisputable charm, and Trollope possesses it.  We may talk wisely and at length of his commonplaceness, lack of spice, philistinism; he can be counted on to amuse us.  He lived valiantly up to his own injunction:  “Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it is readable.”  A simple test, this, but a terrible one that has slain its thousands.  No nineteenth century maker of stories is safer in the matter of keeping the attention.  If the book can be easily laid down, it is always agreeable to take it up again.