Difference of time and convention and pruderies allowed for, Trollope will give you in a page or so of discourse between two Victorian maidens—the whole of it delicately understood, chivalrously handled, tenderly yet firmly revealed—the secret as no novelist has quite revealed it before or since. At any moment one may be surprised by a sudden Jane Austen touch; and this will come with the more startling surprise being dropped by a plain, presumably blunt, man. For Trollope adds to his strain of coarseness, already mentioned, a strain—or at least an intimate understanding—of cheapness. His gentle breeding and his upbringing (poverty-stricken though it had been) ever checked him on the threshold of the holies. But he had tholed too many years in the G.P.O. to have missed intimate acquaintance with

The noisy chaff

And ill-bred laugh

Of clerks on omnibuses.

Those who understand this will understand why he could not bring himself to mate his “dear Lily Dale” with that faithful, most helpful, little bounder Johnny Eames. He knew his Johnny Eames too well to introduce him upon the Cathedral Close of Barchester, though he could successfully dare to introduce the Stanhope family. He walks among rogues, too, and wastrels, with a Mr. Sowerby or a Bertie Stanhope, as sympathetically as among bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons. His picture of Sowerby and the ruin he has brought on an ancient family, all through his own sins is no less and no more truthful than his picture of Mrs. Proudie in altercation with Mr. Slope; while they both are inferior in imaginative power to the scene of Mr. Crawley’s call on the Bishop. In the invention of Crawley, in his perfect handling of that strong and insane mind, I protest that I am astonished almost as though he had suddenly shown himself capable of inventing a King Lear. In this Trollope, with whom one has been jogging along under a slowly growing conviction that he is by miles a greater artist than he knows or has ever been reckoned, there explodes this character—and out of the kindliest intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in a fright and to a sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s originality or taken the great measure of his power.

INDEX

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.