TROLLOPE AS CRITIC OF THE NOVEL

Of all English novelists prior to Henry James, Trollope worked out the most elaborate theory of fiction and assessment of his fellow novelists. Unfortunately he never managed to write his history of English Prose Fiction, but he has left us three chapters and numerous asides on novel writing and novelists in the Autobiography, an 1870 lecture "On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement", the introduction and a scattering of notes for his projected history of fiction, various reviews, and some pertinent remarks in his letters.

In 1868 Trollope wrote a lengthy notice of E. S. Dallas' abridgment of Clarissa. This review, tucked away in Trollope's own unsuccessful St. Paul's Magazine, admirably demonstrates his critical propensities ('). To begin, Trollope is not at all impressed by the praise heaped upon Clarissa by Macaulay, Sir James Mackintosh, and Diderot. Popularity is a surer test. Trollope would grant to Richardson's novel a place among those "standard national works of literature" with which all men like to think they are acquainted. Beaumont and Fletcher, Bunyan, De Foe (except for Robinson Crusoe), Dryden, Chesterfield, even Dr. Johnson (except for the Dictionary) are other instances of "happy literary owners of brevet rank". All men have these authors "on their bookshelves" but never read them.

Why is Clarissa never read ? Quite obviously, it is too long, even in Dallas' three volume abridgment ; in fact, no matter how much an editor were to cut down the novel (Trollope will not pause "to assert that an author should be judged by his works as he himself leaves them"), Clarissa is plainly beyond redemption: "the book is weighted with a double prolixity. It is prolix in all its parts, as well as in its whole .... The telling of every incident is done with a prolixity that to us is amazing".

But even worse than the book's prolixity is its failure in realism. Richardson's epistolary method strikes Trollope "as being as impossible as it is cumbersome". However charming the letters may be in themselves, the reader will feel that "there is a trespass made upon his judgment" if it appears unlikely that these letters could have been composed by the- characters involved, or that they could have been writ-