Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.
Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more.

In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it.

It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else.

But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility.

For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse.