them into novels of plot and novels of
character. To these we have of late years added novels of incident
or adventure, novels of conversation, novels of manners, not to
speak of "novels with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets
in disguise. No one doubted to which of these categories Trollope's
work should be referred. There was in his stories as little plot as a
story can well have. The conversations never beamed with humour like
that of Scott, nor glittered with aphorisms like those of George
Meredith. The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, but
seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of contrivance. Character there
was, and, indeed, great fertility in the creation of character, for
there is hardly one of the tales in which three or four at least
of the personages do not stand out as people whom you would know
again if you met them years after. But the conspicuous merit of
Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his own countrymen, is their
value as pictures of contemporary manners. Here he may claim to
have been surpassed by no writer of his own generation. Dickens, with
all his great and splendid gifts, did not describe the society he
lived in. His personages were too unusual and peculiar to speak and
act and think like the ordinary men and women of the nineteenth
century; nor would a foreigner, however much he might enjoy the
exuberant humour and dramatic power with which they are presented,
learn from them much about the ways and habits of the average
Englishman. The everyday life to which the stories are most true
is the life of the lower middle class in London; and some one has
observed that although this class changes less quickly than the
classes above it, it is already unlike that which Dickens saw when
in the 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics have,
indeed, said that Dickens was too great a painter to be a good
photographer, but the two arts are not incompatible, as appears
from the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, portrayed the
peasantry of his own country in _The Antiquary_. Thackeray, again,
though he has described certain sections of the upper or upper
middle class with far more power and delicacy than Trollope ever
reached, does not go beyond those sections, and has little to tell us
about the middle class generally, still less about the classes
beneath them. Trollope was thoroughly at home in the English middle
class and also (though less perfectly) in the upper cl