One of the benefits of paper reading is the increased likelihood of rereading and therefore remembering.
I was cleaning out the car yesterday and, in the rear passenger’s side, which, I now realize, never gets opened, buried under a car charging cable, a roll of toilet paper, some grocery bags, a toddler-scattered set of travel tools, a jacket, a pair of slippers, and that notorious front license plate, I found the Fall 2024 issue of The Hedgehog Review. Judging from the pencil marks, I left off 8 or 9 months ago with a not-quite-finished essay on the social harmonies of Anthony Trollope.
Some highlights from David K. Anderson’s piece that was eminently worth rereading and finishing (all emphases mine):
• For Trollope, the assessment of a character’s downfall is “a matter of grief as well as condemnation.”
• “Trollope referred to himself, with at touch of self-mockery, as ‘an advanced, but still a Conservative-Liberal.’ He was generally supportive of reform… but suspicious of reforming zeal.”
• For Trollope, no character is ever beyond sympathy:
There is seldom outright opprobrium. A bad man may have good qualities or do a good thing at a crucial moment; a good man may be unfallen only because a blade has never yet been thrust at what we come to see as a weak spot in his armor.
In “A Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Jonathan Swift declares, on the subject of whether it is profitable to argue with skeptics, that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” The dean’s admonition remains a sound one 300 years later. I act and think on the basis of deep-laid assumptions that my reason presupposes. I did not come to hold them through a course of syllogistic logic or long study, but because they were delivered to me as axioms before I knew what an axiom was, or because they made sense of facts that seemed at one time to be paramount, or because I have a half-understood sense that they are acknowledged by others I admire. They can and should be subject to rational scrutiny but only by a long, delicate process, full of fear and trembling. There is no use arguing with me about them; their displacement, if it is possible, will not occur at the level of argument. If you want to displace them, you had better get to know me and be prepared to work hard.
Trollope understands that people have reasons for the way they see the world, deep-rooted and pre-political, and suggests that we might do well to understand them. The simple but salutary platitude that party lines and ideological purity are no sure guide to human decency almost seems a piece of bemusing arcana when we reflect on the network of interlinked, circular firing squads that make up American democracy today.
• Trollope’s “tone is ironic but not sardonic.”
• He “constantly presses upon us the fact that there is always something to know about another person.”
• “Indignation and censure are natural and, often enough, just; however, they must be leavened with compassion, curiosity, and humility regarding our own vices and motives.”
I admit that I’ve had a hard time reading Anthony Trollope. (I believe The Warden is the only one I’ve ever made it through.) But his is a program and a prescription that I can get behind, and one that I need.
Here’s one more highlight from the start of Anderson’s essay:
• “Amid it all, he pieced together a strategy for social harmony: Don’t expect too much from others; be grateful for what good there is; strive to understand them; laugh at them and then laugh at yourself.”
“Don’t expect too much from others” may seem like a rather low and pessimistic bar, but I’m receiving it as wise advice, especially so within the wider, ever-sympathizing Trollopean context.
Perhaps a Trollope reboot is in order.