Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational; sensational readers and antisensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. They who hold by the other are charmed by the construction and the gradual development of the plot. All is, I think a mistake, – which mistake arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree. If a novel fails in either, there is a failure in art.

It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done.

English realism seems to me the deifi cation of the commonplace. Your English realist [i.e. Anthony Trollope] lacks the grim grandeur of Balzac, who can impart an awful sublimity to the bruizes [sic] of a persecuted servant girl – or the senile sorrows of Pere Goriot. Except George Eliot there is no realist writer I care to read – & she seems to me above all criticism.