nner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
phonograph, is essentially feminine.

Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetiere, one
chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
relations of common things. In Charlotte Bronte, again, we have
Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who