Trollope, tact and virtue

pp. 196-200

in: Robert Grant, The politics of sex and other essays, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

Trollope is out of date. The whole trend of Modernist thought this century is against him. His spaciousness, his redundancy, his leisurely tolerance, his lack of "commitment" (to anything except goodness), his unpretentious devotion to the surface of human things, his decency, his belief in the moral bearing and moral value of art — all these add up to what looks very like a culpable shallowness.