If Trollope can be said to be derivative at all, it is Thackeray who most influenced him.  He avows his admiration, wrote the other’s life, and deemed him one who advanced truth-telling in the Novel.  Yet, as was stated, he did not altogether approve of the Master, thinking his satire too steady a view instead of an occasional weapon.  Indeed his strictures in the biography have at times a cool, almost hostile sound.  He may or may not have taken a hint from Thackeray on the re-introduction of characters in other books—­a pleasant device long antedating the nineteenth century, since one finds it in Lyly’s “Euphues.”  Trollope also disliked Dickens’ habit of exaggeration (as he thought it) even when it was used in the interests of reform, and satirized the tendency in the person of Mr. Popular Sentiment in “The Warden.”

The more one studies Trollope and the farther he recedes into the past, the firmer grows the conviction that he is a very distinctive figure of Victorian fiction, a pioneer who led the way and was to be followed by a horde of secondary realistic novelists who could imitate his methods but not reproduce his pleasant effect.

VI

The Brontes, coming when they did, before 1850, are a curious study.  Realism was growing daily and destined to be the fashion of the literary to-morrow.  But “Jane Eyre” is the product of Charlotte Bronte’s isolation, her morbidly introspective nature, her painful sense of personal duty, the inextinguishable romance that was hers as the leal descendant of a race of Irish story-tellers.  She looked up to and worshipped Thackeray, but produced fiction that was like something from another world.  She and her sisters, especially Emily, whose vivid “Wuthering Heights” has all the effect of a visitant from a remote planet, are strangely unrelated to the general course of the nineteenth century.  They seem born out of time; they would have left a more lasting impress upon English fiction had they come before—­or after.  There are unquestionable qualities of realism in “Jane Eyre,” but it is romantic to the core, sentimental, melodramatic.  Rochester is an elder St. Elmo—­hardly truer as a human being; Jane’s sacrificial worship goes back to the eighteenth century; and that famous mad-woman’s shriek in the night is a moment to be boasted of on the Bowery.  And this was her most typical book, that which gave her fame.  The others, “Villette” and the rest, are more truly representative of the realistic trend of the day, but withal though interesting, less characteristic, less liked.  In proportion as she is romantic is she remembered.  The streak of genius in these gifted women must not blind us to the isolation, the unrelated nature of their work to the main course of the Novel.  They are exceptions to the rule.

VII