The realism of Trollope was not confined to the mere reproduction of externals; he gave the illusion of character, without departing from what can be verified by what men know. His photographs were largely imaginary, as all artistic work must be; he constructed his stories out of his own mind. But all is based on what may be called a splendidly reasoned and reasonable experience with Life. His especial service was thus to instruct us about English society, without tedium, within a domain which was voluntarily selected for his own. In this he was also a pioneer in that local fiction which is a geographical effect of realism. And to help him in this setting down of what he believed to be true of humanity, was a style so lucid and simple as perfectly to serve his purpose. 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