“Trollope will remain one of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.”

The Novel-Machine

By GERTRUDE HIMMELFARBJ

The novelist must please, Anthony Trollope thought, but also teach and preach, conveying his “system of ethics,” just as the clergyman does his.

In July 1883, eight months after Anthony Trollope’s death, Henry James wrote a long, appreciative, although not uncritical, essay about him. Recalling their meeting on a trans-Atlantic voyage in 1875, when Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning to write, James went on to evaluate the work of one of England’s pre-eminent and most prolific novelists. Trollope, he judged, was not on a level with Dickens, Thackeray or George Eliot, but he was “in the same family.” “If he was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold that he was), it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties.” His great merit was his appreciation of reality and of the behavior of men and women. James concluded (with his typical qualifying note): “Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.”

Three months later, Trollope’s “Autobiography” (which he had been writing on that memorable voyage) was published, eliciting quite a different response from James. It was, he told a friend, “one of the most curious and amazing books in all literature, for its density, blockishness and general thickness and soddenness.” James was echoing a charge that other critics were beginning to make, that Trollope wrote too much, too quickly, about too many subjects—and for money—to be taken seriously as a novelist.

The “Autobiography” has just been republished in a compact edition by Oxford University Press that includes a small selection of Trollope’s other writings about novelists. It is indeed a curious book, although not in James’s derogatory sense. Many autobiographers make a show of modesty, but Trollope did so more than most, shying away from even dignifying his book as an autobiography. “In writing these pages, which, for want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature.”

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