Trollope: His Life and Art. by C. P. SnowReview by: N. John HallNineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Sep., 1976), pp. 212-216Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933503 .

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212 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

It must have been the combination of many pleasing qualities, rather than the possession of any commanding one, that created his influence. He certainly was not a wit, yet he was always gay, and always said things that made other people merry. His conversation was sparkling, interesting, and fluent, yet it was ob- served he never gave an opinion on any subject and never told an anecdote. Indeed, he would sometimes remark, when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world. And yet Pinto rarely opened his mouth without everybody being stricken with mirth. He had the art of viewing common things in a fanciful light, and the rare gift of raillery which flattered the self-love of those whom it seemed sportively not to spare. Some- times those who had passed a fascinating evening with Pinto would try to remember on the morrow what he had said, and could recall nothing. He was not an intellectual Croesus, but his pockets were full of sixpences. (ch. 28)

This new addition to the Oxford English Novels is worthy of its predecessors in the series. Lothair presents no complicated editorial problems, but the editor has given us a very good text based on the fifth, revised edition (published only a month after the original edi- tion) and collated with the first edition and the holograph at Hughen- den. The variant readings are carefully noted, but since Disraeli's revi- sions usually involved only a single word-the first edition's "gorgeous" gives way to "splendid," its "bad" to "detestable"-no interesting textual discoveries can be expected. There are explanatory notes and a sensible brief introduction.

Considering that this novel is shorter than many in the Oxford series, one would think that space might have been found to reprint the Gen- eral Preface which Disraeli attached to the Lothair volume in his col- lected edition. There should also be some indication of how the novel was tailored to the three-decker form in which it originally appeared. Finally, the querulous reader might-not for the first time-wonder for whom the explanatory notes are intended. We are, for example, patiently given the meanings of "cynosure," "paladin," and "Terpsi- chore," but "Papalini" is not explained, and a significant quotation of an Italian lyric goes untranslated and unascribed.

G. ROBERT STANGE

Tufts University

C. P. SNOW, Trollope: His Life and Art. New York: Scribner's, 1975. Pp. 192. $14.93.

C. P. Snow's Trollope: His Life and Art is not an easy work to appraise. On the one hand, it is obviously not a full-blown critical biography. On the other, Lord Snow's Trollope, in addition to its scholarly paraphernalia of notes and annotated bibliography (however inadequate), has pretensions towards establishing Trollope as a master

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Reviews 213

psychologist in the narrative mode. The coffee-table format need not put us off, as Angus Wilson's book on Dickens so ably demonstrated a few years ago. Whatever the shortcomings of Snow's work-and they will become apparent-it makes a modest contribution to Trollope studies. Snow knows Trollope's fiction well, and, for what it is worth -and I think it is something-he writes with obvious delight and enthusiasm for his subject.

The biographical portions of the book are with one exception plainly derivative. The author draws heavily on Trollope's own Autobiogra- phy; and while he also relies greatly on Sadleir, whom he gives less credit than is his due, he apparently thinks more of Pope Hennessy's biography than seems fitting. However, Snow does present new ma- terial and original insights concerning Trollope's association with the Post Office. Snow, like Trollope, a long-time civil servant, seems on firm ground here, even as Pope Hennessy, who knew Ireland, is best on Trollope in Ireland. He makes eminent good sense in refuting the received explanation that Trollope quit the Post Office in 1867 in a fit of pique because he was passed over for the number two position- assistant secretary-in 1864. "One really can't resign in a huff three years late," as Snow puts it. Moreover, he has uncovered Post Office records ("Whatever Government Departments don't do," he writes, "they do keep records") that show Trollope, on being passed over in 1864, reacting "much like a modern militant trade unionist," getting together his fellow surveyors and demanding more pay, and, when the demand was refused, responding furiously in a four-thousand-word official letter of "remonstrance." Snow describes this letter as "taking high place among the foolish gestures made by sensible and responsible men." It consisted largely of a personal attack upon the man recently promoted to the number one post, John Tilley, who had married Trollope's sister and who was one of his closest friends. This is new ground indeed.

The critical sections of the book, especially the two chapters on Trollope's art, are yet another attempt to determine just what it is that makes Trollope so good. In his assessment Snow acknowledges his debt to Henry James, who wrote: "If [Trollope] was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold he was), it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties. His knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observations of the common behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned or acquired. .. . He had no airs of being able to tell you why people in a given situation would conduct themselves in a particu- lar way; it was enough for him that he felt their feelings and struck the right note, because he had, as it were, a good ear. If he was a knowing psychologist he was so by grace." Snow dresses this passage up, calls Trollope the "finest natural psychologist" among nineteenth-century novelists, and settles on "percipience" as the key to Trollope's excel-

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214 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

lence. His discussion, though hardly original, is well managed as far as it goes, but it falls sadly short of uncovering the secret of Trollope's art. One reads on, awaiting Snow's promised revelation, but it never comes. Trollope's excellence doubtless depends on some subtle and complex mixture of all those elements very different critics have praised in his work. One ought to begin by stressing, as do James and Snow, his crea- tion of realistic, consistent, growing characters; this was in fact Trol- lope's own verdict: "I do not think it probable," he wrote, "that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction;-but if it does, that permanence of success will probably rest on the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and the Rev. Mr. Crawley." But one must add other qualities: the so-called "photographic realism" of Trollope's depiction of social mores, something that has impressed both friendly and hostile readers from the first; his "power of dramatization of the undramatic," as Sadleir puts it, or his "complete appreciation of the usual," in James's words; his "acquiescence" in life as it is, his "almost pugnacious acceptance of reality" (Sadleir again); his ability, in Ruth apRoberts' words, "to be advocate for each of his characters." One ought to include also the excellence of Trollope's dialogue (a subject Snow takes up, although his disquisition on Victorian idiom is unconvincing), and, finally, Lord David Cecil's finding Trollope's excellence in his avoid- ance of the mistakes of his contemporaries, namely sentimentality, melodrama, inconsistency of characterization, and the absolute goodness or evil of characters.

Trollope: His Life and Art has irritating shortcomings. Like many biographers, Snow sometimes yields to the temptation of presenting inference or speculation as fact, as when he declares Trollope's wife Rose the model for the spirited young women of the novels. Snow has a strong liking for Sir Henry Taylor, who accordingly receives numer- ous mentions completely disproportionate to his importance in Trol- lope's life. The author certainly ought to have known that Trollope's early survey of mid-Victorian England-curiously titled The New Zealander-no longer remains unpublished but was issued by Claren- don in 1972. Then there is the deliberately informal even slangy style which, while meant to be beguiling, seems at times patronizing or con- descending. We read, for example, "Trollope always had a special predilection for what he called low brown girls: which didn't mean debased Asiatics, but not-too-tall brunettes." Aside from the fact that Trollope's usual adjective here was "little" or "small" or "short," the humor seems strained.

Finally, there is Snow's propensity for linking Trollope and Tolstoy. He does so largely by virtue of a quotation he offers that has Tolstoy saying in 1877 in connection with The Prime Minister: "Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence" (the reference given is charac-

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Reviews 215

teristically incomplete: "N. N. Gusev, Recollections.... not available in English"). Snow also raises the "possibly insoluble problem" of whether Tolstoy, when he devised Anna Karenina's suicide, had pre- viously read and been influenced by Trollope's account in The Prime Minister of Ferdinand Lopez's suicide beneath a train. Both the quota- tion and the possible influence are provocative. Much of the relevant material is available only in Russian, and I am indebted to R. F. Christian and Patrick Waddington for assistance. It turns out that the reference to Trollope's killing excellence is from 1865 and that it per- tains to The Bertrams. As for Anna's suicide, no connection with The Prime Minister is possible. When Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina in 1873, he drew upon an incident of the previous year when the mis- tress of one of his neighbors committed suicide by throwing herself under a train (Tolstoy was present at the postmortem). And although the writing of Anna Karenina continued to 1877 and involved many changes, the idea of Anna's suicide is in early draft versions. But the Trollope-Tolstoy connection Snow raises is intriguing. Fairly late in life, Tolstoy compiled a list of what he considered to have been im- portant books and authors he had read. He said that some authors had made a "great" impression on him, others a "very great" impres- sion, and a few an "enormous" impression. In the list of his reading from approximately 1863 to 1878, he writes, "Trollope-novels: great impression" (the definitive ninety-volume "Jubilee" edition of Tolstoy, LXVI, 68, 71). Then there are some relevant jottings in Tolstoy's diary for 1865: 29 September, "reading Trollope, good if there weren't so much diffuseness"; 30 September, "Trollope good"; 1 October, "Ber- trams, capital"; 3 October, "finished Trollope, too conventional" (XLVIII, 63-64). Tolstoy was, of course, writing War and Peace at the time. In January 1877 Tolstoy wrote his brother that The Prime Min- ister was "splendid" (LXII, 302). Later, in keeping with his general change of attitude towards life and literature, Tolstoy's judgments were more negative. In an article of 1891, "The First Step," he says Byron's, Maupassant's and Trollope's heroes, "would-be generous and noble, are in fact useless wretches, while their women are mere playthings" (XXIX, 63); and in an occasional book preface, 1901, he speaks of the "decline" in English literature "from Dickens to George Eliot to Thackeray to Trollope to the Kiplings of this world" (XXXIV, 275). It should be added that when the appropriate volume of the catalogue raisonne of Tolstoy's library appears, one will learn which works by Trollope Tolstoy possessed.

The illustrations to Snow's book, over one hundred of them, more than twenty in color, are for the most part well chosen and well pro- duced, although some are merely period pieces dragged in by rather strained captions. For example, that attached to Atkinson Grimshaw's 1877 painting, The Rector's Garden, Queen of the Lilies, reads: "Not

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grand enough for Framley Parsonage, but the girl would fit." But the Trollope-related illustrations are numerous and revealing. One rarely seen photograph of Rose Trollope shows her looking like a disguised boxer; it surely does little to support Snow's contention that she was the model for Trollope's heroines.

N. JOHN HALL Bronx Community College, City University of New York

JOHN W. CLARK, The Language and Style of Anthony Trollope. The Language Library. London: Andre Deutsch, 1975. Pp. 238. ?5.75.

John W. Clark's The Language and Style of Anthony Trollope is a good new resource book for Trollope studies and for language studies. Clark is the author of Early English and (with Eric Partridge) British and American English Since 1900, and he has read and reread most of Trollope. He is the thorough professional, then, and also takes great delight both in language and in Trollope's use of it, and so he is also the amateur in the good sense. But there are some few points where the book is amateur in a less creditable sense. For a serious study on language to go without an index is hardly forgivable. There are at least four misspellings of characters' names. And then it is cavalier of Clark to ignore relevant scholarship, especially when there is so little of it; and it is a pity to omit Trollope's own important comments on style in his study of Thackeray. Other amateur touches seem to me quite forgivable if not ingratiating: the data is limited to novels only, and of those only the forty-two preferred ones, "partly because life is short"; and there is an occasional "Note of source lost," and no claims for completeness or a rigorous system. But the book is broadly learned, just, and readable. It is dedicated to a wife "Lucile, who also-even yet -loves Trollope." Clark loves Trollope, too.

In general, Clark finds Trollope's style "remarkably uniform from beginning to end; uniformly easy, flowing, clear, plain, unlabored, un- affected, unmannered, and above all, businesslike," and remarkably "modern" or "timeless." The Victorian age, it appears, becomes less remote in Trollope's idiom. "His vocabulary is copious and precisely used"; sentences are balanced, within themselves or in pairs, and marked by use of adversative conjunctions; paragraphs are long and rhetorically well organized. Among specifics, Clark first studies grammar and usage, noting those occasional solecisms Trollope was liable to, and those curious cases where what was apparently standard nineteenth- century English has become distinctively twentieth-century American: "gotten" as past participle, for instance. Trollope allows none are and different than, and Clark thinks these are nonstandard; but in my ex- perience the English are less fastidious about these than Americans are.

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