The Ashburton Guardian. Magna est Veritas, et Prevalebit. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1882. The Death of Anthony Trollope.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 819, 15 December 1882, Page 2

The Ashburton Guardian. Magna est Veritas, et Prevalebit. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1882. The Death of Anthony Trollope.

The news has reached us by cable message from the Home country within the last few days that Anthony Trollope, the novelist, is dead. He was not a great man, but he was a very well-known one, and so perhaps it may be worth while to take some passing

notice of what he really was and did. He died at the age of 67, and therefore nearly approached the prescribed average limit of life—three score years and ten. It was a mature age, but it seems almost a wonder that he'did not live longer. His robust make and whole appearance, and his full red face, more like that of a farmer than ot a literary man, seemed to betoken long life. His intelligence was sufficient to keep him from ennui, and certainly not sufficient to make him, like Herbert Spencer, a victim to nervousness and' monomania. He could scarcely be troubled with anxiety about financial matters, for, in the present day, few people are paid so well as successful novelists. He could not be rendered irritable by want of suitable society, for that in which he constantly moved, the world of English middle class life, was the only one with which he had the slightest sympathy, but with that he was always at home and thoroughly popular. Still, death comes to all, sooner or later, and it is idle to attempt to predict the time or cause of any man’s exit to the majority. Trollope’s name is not one which is likely to be handed down for years as that of a great master of fiction. There was little in him of reflective power, of sparkling wit, or of brilliant imagination. But he had good common sense, a lively style, and, above all things, he understood the kind of society he painted the society of the upper middle classes in England—thoroughly well. His Mrs Proudie, the bishop’s wife, Archdeacon Grantley and his wife, his rectors, curates, etc., are all of them true to the life, genuine photographs, as the paintings of Ostade, Jan Steen, Mien’s are of Dutch boors drinking, interiors of Dutch kitchens, etc. We may apply to Trollope what Coleridge says of Paley’s ethical writings, “ Whatever he saw he saw through an atmosphere of light.” There is nothing specially instructive in Trollope, any more than there is in the conversation of a ball-room, where the talk is just a little over the average, and in all his writings, taken together, the readers would scarcely learn as much as they would in many a single chapter of Walter Scott, Charles Kingsley, or George Eliot. If ever he is read at all a hundred years hence it will be in order that the people may know exactly what respectable country life in England in the middle of the nineteenth century was like. And not the highest kind of respectable country life in England either. There are, let us be thankful for it, several noblemen and ladies of title, and a good many of the very station and position Mr Trollope was so fond of describing, to whom life has duties as well as enjoyments, and who discharge those duties at least more laboriously and conscientiously than such clergvmen, gentlemen, and ladies as he drew. The life the departed novelist describes is only one of decent epicureanism. The sins and sorrows, the poverty and sufferings, the blank despairs, the baffled aspirations, the hopelessstruggles of life, if we may judge from his works, he no more knew or sympathised with than did the moths and butterflies among the trees of his garden. He was not by any means a bad man, but he cannot be regarded as one of the highest stamp. At the latter part of the last century there were many such as he among the frequenters of the Court ot poor Marie Antoinette. But the society of that day was not a success, and its whole fabric came down with a terrible crash when the time of the French revolution arrived. Such a catastrophe is not likely to take place in England. Fortunately for our country the Trollopian world is not the only one there. Such men as Lord Shaftesbury, and such women as Florence Nightingale, and a thousand others among our men and women, belong to a different sphere, and can only be depicted by an artist of higher powers than him who has just left us. To get into what is called “good society,” and to mix with it, and to boast of its possession, is, after all, not a very high ideal of life. I