humour, the cathedral society of
"Barchester" as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived: and he
did it. The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal
subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. _Barchester
Towers_ remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the
liveliest books in English fiction. There had been nothing like it (for
Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since
Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely
different. Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for
variety and vigour of character drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop
Proudie, the ne'er-do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others
stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a
great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike
conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary number of
examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above,
this standard. It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps,
suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles--the
chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others
to the brilliant _Last Chronicle of Barset_ (1867), which in some
respect surpasses _Barchester Towers_ itself, with a second series, not
quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and
yet others. His total production was enormous: it became in fact
impossibly so, and the work of his last _lustrum_ and a little more (say
1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious
hack-work. But between _The Warden_ and _The American Senator_,
twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels,
of which at least half were much above the average and some quite
capital.[26] Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some
critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are
reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very
considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners,
speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which
does not--like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook
and Surtees--lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who
dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the
presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the
_average_ nove