which could not fail to thrive under the double stimulus of a fermenting environment about which there were endless things to be said, and a general liberation from external control which allowed these seething utterances free and full play of expression.
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,—[1]
"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
- ↑ Leslie Stephen: George Eliot, 67-68.
