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Title: One of the master's masterpieces
Review: As a professor of literature, and as a "common reader," I revere Tolstoy above all other novelists I have read, but I would place Trollope just below him, in company with Dickens, Balzac, Austen, and Lawrence. It did not surprize me much to learn, while reading a biography of Tolstoy,that he had a great admiration for Trollope's work. Both these men share, in my opinion, an almost Olympian view of the human beings they have created. I sometimes think these men are writers for grown-ups because they do not deal in villains. We see their characters, as they do, as from a great height, so that Trollope's Crosbie, or Tolstoy's Vronsky demand from us almost as much compassion as those whom they injure. I guess I could sum up why I respect Trollope so: he is the master of ordinary life, and --like Tolstoy--he makes it extraordinary. The clerical hero of "The Vicar of Bullhampton" is one of the extraordinary, ordinary men. You will remember him.
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