with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented
by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older
writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged
and younger. To these in some degree, and to those who have finished
their career in the last thirty years to a greater, we must now turn.




CHAPTER VIII

THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION


In regard to a large part of the subject of the present chapter the
present writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week and
almost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so
happened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly with
the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the
nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of the
last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all along
its course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, be
insisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally in
literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos
and allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of an
inclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in which
isolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of the
central group, but in which the table lands are lower, the _average_
height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer and
nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens there