‘That is, a parson – a parson first, you know, and a bishop afterwards. If I had begun,
I’d have stuck to it. But, on the whole, I like the Church of Rome best.’
The bishop could not discuss the point, so he remained silent.
‘Now, there’s my father,’ continued Bertie; ‘he hasn’t stuck to it. I fancy he didn’t like
saying the same thing over so often. By the bye, Bishop, have you seen my father?’This conversation at cross-purposes matches Bertie’s idle enquiries about the
work and rewards of the spiritual life against the offended sense of caste of the
supposed reformer. Trollope’s Olympian calm and humour are winningly displayed
at Barchester, but he can be more than amusing. Trollope renders his hundreds of
characters, often country gentry or people in the learned professions, with unobtru-
sive patient care. His moral realism has Jane Austen’s value for integrity and
Thackeray’s eye for the operation of interest, with a far less evident irony. Unlike
Dickens, he has no violently good or evil characters, and less melodrama than
George Eliot. After Barset, his benign tone darkens in the Palliser novels. The late The
Way We Live Now is a satire upon speculative finance.
Trollope’s readership has grown, full sets of his forty-seven novels appearing in the
1990s from five publishers. The Palliser novels of high politics and marital intrigue, after
Can You Forgive Her?, are more ambitious in their moral explorations. As the novel
must entertain, Trollope may be a major novelist. He is certainly a master of the form
whose supreme master, Leo Tolstoy, said of him, ‘He kills me with his excellence.’ The
realism in which he excels is broad and everyday rather than deep or intense. Anthony
Trollope and Gerard Hopkins are opposites, both as writers and as Christians.George Eliot
George Eliot(1819–1880) was bor n Mary Ann Evans, daughter of the steward of a
Warwickshire estate, a circumstance which informs all her work.Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the
thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could
never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, – if it were not the
earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with
our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass – the same hips and haws on
the autumn hedgerows – the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’, because
they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony
where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the
oaks between me and the blue sky, the white starflowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and
the ground ivy at my feet – what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid
broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this
home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its
fitful brightness, these furrowed grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it
by the capricious hedgerows – such things as these are the mother tongue of our
imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the
fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the
deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls,
if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and
transform our perception into love.This is from early in The Mill on the Floss. The ‘capricious’ hedgerows recall the ‘little
lines of sportive wood run wild’ above Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth found in the300 10 · FICTION