Thus have all things worked together for the good of the Victorian novel. It was fortunate alike in its endowment, its alliances, and its surroundings. A period of such upheaval, such introspection, such anxious responsibility, and withal such zest of life, all diffused through a democratic atmosphere, could best be interpreted by a form of literature which, besides being in itself thoroughly democratic, gives large scope for the author’s comments and conclusions. The drama is an excellent reflector, but necessarily impersonal; a dilemma that is dodged rather than solved by the Shavian device of Prefaces. The lyric, on the contrary, is too personal to be representative. And concentrated exposition is admittedly strong meat for the intellectual babes who constitute the vast majority, or even, as a steady diet, for children of a larger growth. This does not mean, of course, that the novel is a childish product or plaything; but that its union of the dramatic and didactic, the emotional and rational, the picturesque and significant, the merry and sad, together with its absolutely unrestricted range in material, makes it ideal as a popular type in the best sense of the word. A critic of the time half ironically remarks,--[71] “The future historians of literature * * * will no doubt analyze the spirit of the age and explain how the novelists, more or less unconsciously, reflected the dominant ideas which were agitating the social organism. * * * The novelists were occupied in constructing a most elaborate panorama of the manners and customs of their own times with a minuteness and psychological analysis not known to their predecessors. Their work is, of course, an implicit criticism of life.” With all the encouragement bestowed upon them the Victorian novelists could indeed do no less than live up to their opportunities. Not _ad astra per aspera_ lay their destiny. Nothing more was asked of them than to refrain from burying their talents, and to this admonition they were zealously obedient. The writers themselves supply striking inductive data as to the general diffusion both of fiction and satire. A list of the dozen most prominent Victorian novelists shows that no one of them was wholly devoid of interest in public affairs, and none was entirely lacking in the satiric touch. On the other hand, every one of them saw more on his horizon than current events, and all were something more than mere critics or humorists or even both.