will, of nerve, and of endurance.  “It’s dogged as does it!” says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in The Last Chronicle of Barset; and if “dogged” could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently “dogged.”  But a great novelist needs other gifts.  And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him—­this is to tell us palpable nonsense.

Trollope’s sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe.  And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable:  it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash.  It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods.  Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque.  Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious.  He is very often dull:  or rather utterly commonplace.  It is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste.  His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace.  It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original.  His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country.  But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.

One of Trollope’s strong points and one source of his popularity was a command over plain English almost perfect for his own limited purpose.  It is limpid, flexible, and melodious.  It never rises into eloquence, poetry, or power; but it is always easy, clear, simple, and vigorous.  Trollope was not capable of the sustained mastery over style that we find in Esmond, nor had he the wit, passion, and pathos at Thackeray’s command.  But of all contemporaries he comes nearest to Thackeray in easy conversations and in quiet narration of incidents and motives.  Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope is vulgar—­for good old Anthony had a coarse vein:  it was in the family:—­but as a rule his language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone.  This was one good result of his enormous rapidity of execution.  His books read from cover to cover, as if they were spoken in one sitting by an improvisatore in one and