ass; and his
pictures are all the more true to life because there is not that vein
of stern or cynical reflection which runs through Thackeray, and makes
us think less of the story than of the moral. Trollope usually has a
moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and quietly put, that it does
not distract attention from the minor incidents and little touches
of every day which render the sketches lifelike. If even his
best-drawn characters are not far removed from the commonplace
this helps to make them fairly represent the current habits and
notions of their time. They are the same people we meet in the street
or at a dinner-party; and they are mostly seen under no more
exciting conditions than those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis
match, or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking for effect,
or scheming for some petty temporary end; they are not under the
influence of strong passions, or forced into striking situations,
like the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or George Eliot's
novels; and for this reason again they represent faithfully the
ordinary surface of English upper and upper middle class society:
its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, its
snobbishness, its worship of conventionalities, its aloofness from or
condescension to those whom it deems below its own level; and
therewith also its public spirit, its self-helpfulness, its
neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and straightforwardness,
its easy friendliness of manner towards all who stand within the
sacred pale of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one more
skilfully noted and set down those transient tastes and fashions
which are, so to speak, the trimmings of the dress, and which,
transient though they are, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries,
will have an interest for one who, a century or two hence, feels the
same curiosity about our manners as we feel about those of the
subjects of King George the Third. That Trollope will be read at
all fifty years after his death one may hesitate to predict,
considering how comparatively few in the present generation read
Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss Edgeworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and
how much reduced is the number of those who read even Walter Scott
and Thackeray. But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather
from his pages better than from any others an impression of what
everyday life was like in England in the "middle Victorian" period.
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