For unobtrusive ease,
idiomatic naturalness and that familiarity which escapes
vulgarity and retains a quiet distinction, no one has excelled
him. It is one reason why we feel an intimate knowledge of his
characters. Mr. Howells declares it is Trollope who is most like
Austen "in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as
unphilosophized as the light of common day"--though he goes on
to deplore that he too often preferred to be "like the
caricaturist Thackeray"--a somewhat hard saying. It is a
particular comfort to read such a writer when intensely personal
psychology is the order of the day and neither style nor
interpretation in fiction is simple.

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
u