good opinion she coveted.  But she remained splendidly wholesome and inspiring in her fiction, because she clung to her faith in spiritual self-development, tested all life by the test of duty, felt the pathos and the preciousness of inconspicuous lives, and devoted herself through a most exceptional career to loving service for others.  She was therefore not only a novelist of genius, but a profoundly good woman.  She had an ample practical credo for living and will always be, for those who read with their mind and soul as well as their eyes, anything but a depressing writer.  For them, on the contrary, she will be a tonic force, a seer using fiction as a means to an end—­and that end the betterment of mankind.

CHAPTER XI

TROLLOPE AND OTHERS

Five or six writers of fiction, none of whom has attained a position like that of the three great Victorians already considered, yet all of whom loomed large in their day, have met with unequal treatment at the hands of time:  Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Reade, Trollope, Kingsley.  And the Brontes might well be added to the list.  The men are mentioned in the order of their birth; yet it seems more natural to place Trollope last, not at all because he lived to 1882, while Kingsley died seven years earlier.  Reade lived two years after Trollope, but seems chronologically far before him as a novelist.  In the same way, Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton, as we now look back upon them, appear to be figures of another age; though the former lived to within a few years of Trollope, and the latter died but two years before Kingsley.  Of course, the reason that Disraeli impresses us as antiquated where Trollope looks thoroughly modern, is because the latter is nearest our own day in method, temper and aim.  And this is the main reason why he has best survived the shocks of time and is seen to be the most significant figure of an able and interesting group.  Before he is examined, something may be said of the others.

In a measure, the great reputation enjoyed by the remaining writers was secured in divisions of literature other than fiction; or derived from activities not literary at all.  Thus Beaconsfield was Premier, Bulwer was noted as poet and dramatist, and eminent in diplomacy; Kingsley a leader in Church and State.  They were men with many irons in the fire:  naturally, it took some years to separate their literary importance pure and simple from the other accomplishments that swelled their fame.  Reade stood somewhat more definitely for literature; and Trollope, although his living was gained for years as a public servant, set his all of reputation on the single throw of letters.  He is Anthony Trollope, Novelist, or he is nothing.

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