Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding by R.C. Terry (review)

HUMANITIES 413 R.C. Terry. Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding Macmillan '977. 286. iIlus. $29.25 Professor Terry begins this pleasantly old-fashioned book with a modest disclaimer. He suggests that Trollope frequently has been categorized as, among other things, a moralist, a psychologist, and a social historian. He says that he feels that it would be presumptuous for him to add a '''new'' Trollope'; so he will concern himself with a 'consolidated Trollope: a reassessment of this tantalizing character and the disarmingly placid world of his novels.' What he really seems to wish to do is to establish Trollope as the epitome of the novelist in what the historian E.L. Burn has called 'The Age of Equipoise.' Indeed, Terry has entitled his first chapter 'The Equal Mind.' Three of Terry's eight chapters are devoted to an examination of Trollope 's treatment of love, marriage, the domestic life, and of his attitudes to those who are deprived of the happiness and comfort which come in marriage. These chapters are supported by a biographical one in which Terry tries to slip behind Trollope's mask in the Autobiography and correspondence to show something of his 'inner life.' Terry claims, I am sure justly, that Trollope knew perfectly well how little he was revealing, and he sees Trollope's own marriage as the source of the balance and felicity in his life and work. Terry is perhaps too quick to sketch the outline of that missing inner life from hints given by the fiction. No doubt N. John Hall's new edition of the letters will be a help to those who follow. Nevertheless, Terry has read carefully and wisely; he is convincing when he sees changing relations in the marriage of Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora as the centre of the entire Palliser series, illuminating the conduct of others and reflecting it. He knows that Trollope understood sexual love and is able to describe the shorthand that he used to indicate it. Politics take second place, as do the religious concerns of clergymen in the Barchester series. Moreover, Teny is sensible in his evaluation of the less-well-known novels, particularly The Bertrams and Alaya's Angel, and shrewd in the importance that he places on these in establishing Trollope's views. In other chapters Terry deals with Trollope's reputation and popularity, his relation to Ireland and to the Irish question, and, finally, with what he calls 'The Outside World: that is, Trollope's treatment of society and the moral life. These chapters in some ways distract the reader from Terry's central thesis. Accepting Trollope's own view, Terry sees him as a novelist of character rather than as a social novelist. He stresses the importance of The Life of Cicero in evaluating Trollope's moral stance and credits the contribution that. Ruth apRoberts has made in this respect. He has used his nineteenth-century materials well and has provided useful bibliographies and full notes. His own style is easy, and, although he observes 4'4 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 that it is usually necessary to quote at greater length than he finds possible, he is able to demonstrate Trollope's skill through sound observations and, in addition, he is aware of Trollope's irony without being false to the sentimentality. This is not a book that breaks much new ground in critical theory (James Kincaid's The Novels ofAnthony Trollope takes a large step forward here), but it is a sound book, one which assists a new reader to place Trollope adequately. (MICHAEL LAINE) P.T. Phillips, editor. The View from the Pulpit: Victorian Ministers and Society Macmillan of Canada. 326. $'9.95 These studies of Anglican, Protestant nonconformist, and Roman Catholic clergy and ministers contain useful information for the student of nineteenth-century religion and social affairs in England and Ireland. The essays are all on individual men. They are not the great minds of Victorian Christianity; but those who belong most irrecoverably to their own period interest us just because their lives and works are so intensely of the time that they have immense social significance. (We can imagine that in another century...