About Trollope, in a Postwar Mood

Abstract

VERY GREAT and popular writer has his ups and downshis enormous following in his own day, his sharp and biting neglect by the wise succeeding age, and the final and rough justice of the generation that reacts to the reacting generation. It is then that he is paid the tribute of being measured by common sense, and even the mildest prejudices on the subject of him have to pretend to a reason. If the age likes him because of one of its own urges-as the unmoral I930's liked the mood poems of Tennyson-it makes the self-complimentary assumption that that urge is a universal truth and a canon of criticism. There is, however, one constant temptation for a generation which has just discovered that a genius is not an idiot, and that is to make him a god. His simplest statements are discovered to contain a deep, hidden wisdom; his pedestrian side is found to be inspired common sense; his mild conjectures are unheeded prophecies; his verbosities are pleasant ramblings; his pettiest carpings with trivialities are in reality his putting his finger on the sorest spot of his age; and the worth of people in his times and in the next is measured by their fidelity to his own focal importance. Of all people, however, the great Victorians are hardest to canonize: there is a high stubbornness and a bluntness which means one thing, and that only. Their times are still too close for objectivity; and they made the mistake of being in revolt without first asking the twentieth century how far they should go. It has been found that none of them went far enough. But there was one great Mid-Victorian whose conduct is infinitely more satisfactory to an age which is critical of effort, but infinitely kind toward naivete: he accepted the status quo with a