The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life grazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; . . . all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after--

Immediately following these sentences relating Dorothea's disorientation comes the kind of generalization that has long been considered typical of George Eliot (and the implied authors of her novels): "Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures in a doze." The concluding portion of this sentence then applies this generalization to Dorothea in the form of a narrative of her future, for we are told that in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued o see the vastness of St Peter's. . . . spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina." Eliot's implied author moves back and forth among statements of narrative, description, and generalized truths that support the other two, providing them with a context and richer meaning, but that do not relate specifically to them.

In contrast to the way Eliot here intertwines sentences and even phrases of generalizing commentary with narrative and description, Trollope's The Way We Live Now contains wisdom statements that take the form of miniature essays. Trollope's narrator here is comnenting upon those guests who eagerly attended Melmotte's banluet for the Emperor of China despite believing their host immoral nd even criminal:

There can be no doubt that the greater part of the people assembled did believe that their host had committed some great fraud. which might probably bring him under the arm of the law. When such rumors are spread abroad, they are always believed. There is an excitement and a pleasure in believing them. Reasonable hesiration at such a moment is dull and phlegmatic. If the accused be one near ; enough to ourselves to make the accusation a matter of personal pain, of course we disbelieve. But, if the distance be beyond this, we are almost ready to think that anything may be true of anybody. In this case nobody really loved Melmotte and everybody did believe. It was so probable that such a man should have done something horrible! It was only hoped that the fraud might be great and horrible enough. (Chap. 62)

The first sentence in this paragraph, like the last three, comments directly upon the thoughts of characters whose actions are being narrated by the implied author. The five that follow, in contrast, form a kind of extractable essay that presents the narrator's under standing of how people act in general and not just in this specific case. One can make three observations about this Trollopean moral essay-in-miniature: First, it presents general truths that are not specific to the facts or situation being narrated. Second, it focuses our judgments of the events and actions presented by the implied author. As Wayne Booth points out, "any story will be unintelligible unless it includes, however subtly, the amount of telling necessary not only to make us aware of the value system which gives it its meaning but, more important, to make us willing to accept that value system, at least temporarily.... The work itself ... must fill with its rhetoric the gap made by the suspension of my own beliefs" (112). The implied author's comments, in other words, provide necessary pointers to the reader, which, even if they do not change his mind completely about any particular moral or other judgment, nonetheless orient him and in this way inform him how to interpret a particular set of actions and ideas. Third, Trollope's brief essay on the way people delight in rumor also serves to build the reader's confidence in the implied author, who appears in such statements as a wisdom speaker.

Although such remarks will have their most positive effects when the reader accepts them as valid generalizations about human conduct, they work to an important degree even when he takes them only as witty, if cynical, observations and apothegms, and they do so because they inform the reader how the implied author wishes to be understood. In other words, such statements, which generations of readers have testified provide a great deal of the pleasure in the novels of Trollope, Eliot, Thackeray, and other Victorians, indicate both how readers should judge character and event and also how they should regard the presenter of them. Even if readers refuse to grant the narrator full credibility, even if they resist and reserve judgment, they at least do not feel at sea in the world of the novel.

Furthermore, even when the implied author presents attitudes and opinions with which the audience chooses not to agree, he does not produce the sage's characteristically abrasive effect, for such generalizations rarely involve either the Victorian sage's aggressiveness and assumed superiority or the modern sage's equally aggressive thrusting of private weakness and intimate fact upon the reader.