Trollopian 

Abstract: ...N OT MANY years ago Ford Madox Ford said that George Moore's aloofness from life had generally kept him from being considered in critical discussions, but that there was not a critic "with any pretensions to knowledge of letters who would not acknowledge when challenged that Moore was infinitely the most skillful man of letters of his day-the most skillful in the whole world' This tribute, coming as it does amid Ford's damaging comments on Moore's cold and clammy personality, serves at least to place Moore as a very important modern. But there are many other reasons why Moore has been omitted from critical discussions, not least among which is the difficulty of placing him satisfactorily. To speak of him with authority one must read a vast quantity of poor and sloppy fiction and disentangle it from what is undeniably first-rate; and one has to be aware of the author's different intent in each of his numerous fresh starts. There is no such thing as a typical George Moore novel. And again, when we compare the heterogeneous mass of Moore's novels with the uniform suave urbanity and originality of his critical and autobiographical writings, we are confronted with a contrast that does not lend itself to ready generalizations. In the nonfiction writings Moore reveals himself as a thoroughly modern spirit, even as far back as the eighteen-eighties. But in his fiction of the 'eighties and 'nineties there is much tameness, timidity, and compromise, and we even see occasional capitulation to the conventional moralizing that Moore so bitterly attacked in his critical writings. The essentials of Moore the modern are sufficiently revealed to us

Abstract: ARLYLE and Dickens were contemporaries in a modified sense, for actually they belonged to different generations. Carlyle was separated from the novelist by seventeen years. When we first hear him commenting on the younger man, it is in July, i837, in a letter to John Sterling, from Ecclefechan where he is vacationing. There he has with him some reading, of which he mentions specifically Muller's history and Pickwick. The former work he calls