It seems just to represent all these secondary novelists as subsidiary to Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot. Fascinating isolated figures like Borrow, who will always be cherished by the few, are perforce passed by. We are trying to keep both quality and influence in mind, with the desire to show the writers not by themselves alone but as part of a stream of tendency which has made the English Novel the distinct form it is to-day. Even a resounding genius, in this view, may have less meaning than an apparent plodder like Trollope, who, as time goes by, is seen more clearly to be one of the shaping forces in the development of a literary form. CHAPTER XII HARDY AND MEREDITH We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive of change in the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands. As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola. England, like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence. Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola taught it to regard a human being--individual or collectively social--as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory and his practice, not always consistent with it, was sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a method, and a school of fiction. Naturalism, linking hands with l'art pour art--"a fine phrase is a moral action--there is no other morality in literature," cried Zola--became a banner-cry, with "the flesh is all" its chief article of belief. No study of the growth of English fiction can ignore this typical modern movement, however unpleasant it may be to follow it. The baser and more brutal phases of the Novel continental and insular look to this derivation. Zola's remarkable pronunciamento "The Experimental Novel," proves how honestly he espoused the doctrine of the realist, how blind he is to its partial view. His attempt to subject the art of fiction to the exact laws of science, is an illustration of the influence of scientific thought upon a mind not broadly cultured, though of unusual native quality. Realism of the modern kind--the kind for which Zola stands--is the result in a form of literature of the necessary intellectual unrest following on the abandonment of older religious ideals. Science had forced men to give up certain theological conceptions; death, immorality, God, Man,--these were all differently understood, and a period of readjustment, doubt and negation, of misery and despair, was the natural issue. Man, being naturally religious, was sure sooner or later to secure a new and more hopeful faith: it was a matter