This group then of novelists, sinking all individual differences, marks the progress of the method of realism over the romance.  Scarcely one is conspicuous for achievement in the latter, while almost all of them did yeoman service in the former.  In some cases—­those of Disraeli and Bulwer—­the transition is seen where their earlier and later work is contrasted; with a writer like Trollope, the newer method completely triumphs.  Even in so confirmed a romance-maker as Wilkie Collins, to whom plot was everything and whose cunning of hand in this is notorious, there is a concession to the new ideal of Truth.  He was touched by his time in the matter of naturalness of dialogue, though not of event.  Wildly improbable and wooden as his themes may now seem, their manner is realistic, realism of speech, in fact, being an element in his effectivism.  Even the author of “The Moonstone” is scotched by the spirit of the age, and in the preface to “Armsdale” declares for a greater freedom of theme—­one of the first announcements of that desire for an extension of the subject-matter which was in the next generation to bring such a change.

It seems just to represent all these secondary novelists as subsidiary to Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot.  Fascinating isolated figures like Borrow, who will always be cherished by the few, are perforce passed by.  We are trying to keep both quality and influence in mind, with the desire to show the writers not by themselves alone but as part of a stream of tendency which has made the English Novel the distinct form it is to-day.  Even a resounding genius, in this view, may have less meaning than an apparent plodder like Trollope, who, as time goes by, is seen more clearly to be one of the shaping forces in the development of a literary form.

CHAPTER XII

HARDY AND MEREDITH

We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive of change in the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands.  As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola.  England, like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence.  Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme:  Zola taught it to regard a human being—­individual or collectively social—­as primarily animal:  that is, he explains action on this hypothesis.  And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to the so-called naturalism.  Zola believed in this view as a theory and his practice, not always consistent with it, was sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a method, and a school of fiction.  Naturalism, linking hands with l’art pour art—­“a fine phrase is a moral action—­there is no other morality in literature,”