New tendencies, moreover, embodying themselves in new schools, were already beginning to appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of the school of psychological analysis, soon to be followed by Mr. Kipling with a type of imaginative directness distinctively his own, were beginning to lead minds and tastes into other directions. The influence of France was more felt than it had been when Trollope began to write. And what a contrast between Trollope's manner and that of his chief French contemporaries, such as Octave Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Maupassant! The French novelists, be their faculty of invention greater or less, at any rate studied their characters with more care than English writers had usually shown. The characters were fewer, almost as few as in a classical drama; and the whole action of the story is carefully subordinated to the development of these characters, and the placing of them in a critical position which sets their strength and weakness in the fullest light. There was more of a judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole in French fiction than in ours, and therefore more unity of impression was attained. Trollope, no doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He crowded his canvas with figures; he pursued the fortunes of three or four sets of people at the same time, caring little how the fate of the one set affected that of the others; he made his novel a sort of chronicle which you might open anywhere and close anywhere, instead of a drama animated by one idea and converging towards one centre. He neglected the art which uses incidents small in themselves to lead up to the _denoument_ and make it more striking. He took little pains with his diction, seeming not to care how he said what he had to say. These defects strike those who turn over his pages to-day. But to those who read him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was redeemed by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with which the story moved, the freshness and faithfulness of its pictures of character and manners. ----- [21] Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen of self-portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and leaves an agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard Garnett has written well of him in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. JOHN RICHARD GREEN[22]