Trollope is never guilty of an excess in any direction, and the vice of his villain is of so mild a quality that it is powerless to prejudice him against his even milder virtues. These seem to us insufficient to account for Clara's passion, for we are bound to believe that for her it was a passion. As far as the reader sees, Captain Aylmer has done nothing to excite it and everything to quench it, and, indeed, we are quite taken by surprise when, after her aunt's death, she answers his proposal with so emphatic an affirmative. It is a pleasant surprise, however, to find any of Mr. Trollope's people doing a thing contrary to common sense. Nothing can be better – always from the Dutch point of view – than the management of the reaction in both parties against their engagement; but to base the rupture of a marriage engagement upon an indisposition on the part of the gentleman's mother that the lady shall maintain an acquaintance of long standing with another lady whose past history is discovered to offer a certain little vantagepoint for scandal, is, even from the Dutch point of view, an unwarrantable piece of puerility. But the shabbiness of grand society – and especially the secret meannesses, parsimonies, and cruelties of the exemplary British matron – have as great an attraction for Mr. Trollope as they had for Thackeray; and the account of Clara's visit to the home of her intended, the description of the magnificent bullying of Lady Aylmer, and the picture of Miss Aylmer – »as ignorant, weak, and stupid a poor woman as you shall find anywhere in Europe« – make a sketch almost as relentless as the satire of Vanity Fair or The Newcomes. There are several other passages equally clever, notably the chapter in which Belton delivers up Miss Amedroz to her lover's care at the hotel in London; and in which, secure in his expression elsewhere of Belton's superiority to Aylmer, the author feels that he can afford to make him still more delicately natural than he has made him already by contrasting him, pro tempore, very disadvantageously with his rival, and causing him to lose his temper and make a fool of himself.

Such praise as this we may freely bestow on the work before us, because, qualified by the important stricture which we have kept in reserve, we feel that it will not seem excessive. Our great objection to The Belton Estate is that, as we read it, we seemed to be reading a work written for children; a work below the apprehension of the average man and woman, or, at the very most, on a level with it, and in no particular above it. The Belton Estate is a stupid book; and in a much deeper sense than that of being simply dull, for a dull book is always a book that might have been lively. A dull book is a failure. Mr. Trollope's story is stupid and a success. It is essentially, organically, consistently stupid; stupid in direct proportion to its strength. It is without a single idea. It is utterly incompetent to the primary functions of a book, of whatever nature, namely – to suggest thought. In a certain way, indeed, it suggests thought; but this is only on the ruins of its own existence as a book. It acts as the occasion, not as the cause, of thought. It indicates the manner in which a novel should not, on any account, be written. That it should deal exclusively with dull, flat, commonplace people was to be expected; and this need not be a fault; but it deals with such people as one of themselves; and this is what Lady Aylmer would call a ›damning‹ fault. Mr. Trollope is a good observer; but he is literally nothing else. He is apparently as incapable of disengaging an idea as of drawing an inference. All his incidents are, if we may so express it, empirical. He has seen and heard every act and every speech that appears in his pages. That minds like his should exist, and exist in plenty, is neither to be wondered at nor to be deplored; but that such a mind as his should devote itself to writing novels, and that these novels should be successful, appears to us an extraordinary fact.

 

 

Taine's English Literature

We hesitate to express perfect satisfaction at the appearance of an English version of M. Taine's massive essay.2 On the one hand, the performance is no more than a proper compliment to a highly complimentary work; but, on the other, it involves so effective a violation of the spirit of that work and so rude a displacement of its stand-point, as to interfere with a just comprehension of it. M. Taine himself, however, stands sponsor in a short Preface, and the liberal reception of the two volumes seems to indicate that English readers are not sensible of having unduly lost by the transfer.