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

Abstract

not being quite bright enough to know exactly what he was trying to say to me.” She adds: “ Maybe he was being rude to me, but I didn’t feel sure enough of that to be angry, and why be angry?” This sweet reasonableness and quiet determination enabled Coburn to triumph at each stage of her pilgrimage — from the parsonage where she had been one of six children, to Victoria College among the all-male learned, and thence to Oxford and out to the wide world of British integrity, noblesse oblige and scholarly rivalry. Kathleen Coburn gives us glimpses of her other, her private pursuits: her quiet life on her island in Georgian Bay, her friendships with the local Indians, her ability to balance periods of intense work in England with repose in her quiet Canadian retreat. England has become for her a second country. And we also glimpse some of the scholars and writers she encountered — delicate pen portraits, admirable in their summing-up. These include Walter de la Mare, Edmund Blunden, Douglas Grant, John Hayward, Margaret Murray, Humphry House, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards, and others. For those of us who have been pursuers, but have not kept Coburn’s meticulous records, who look back into a series of half-forgotten adventures that merge and blur, it is a delight to recover in Cobum’s narrative the deepest meaning of human­ istic research, the kind of personal riches one silently earns. They are pro­ foundly difficult to describe; they belong to the heart of one’s commitment, to a sense of the past, and the deepest springs of literary re-creation. l e o n e d e l / The University of Hawaii R. C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (London: The Mac­ millan Press, 1977). xi, 286. $25.05 In Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding, R. C. Terry has produced a fine guide to Trollope. It is a treasury of good quotations well culled from the many novels, and presented through a sensible and informed commentary. It includes an entertaining collection of contemporary comments on Trollope the man, as well as a summary of the life, and a thoroughly researched and convincing assessment of Trollope’s literary reputation. And it testifies throughout to patient research and a thorough familiarity with the enor­ mous oeuvre. The book will not revolutionize the way we read Trollope’s novels, and I think is not intended to overturn accepted judgments or offer us a new read­ ing. It is offered as a balanced assessment of the whole achievement, and is moderate and conservative in its approach. Terry’s claims for Trollope’s artistry are almost as modest as Trollope’s own, though he can see through the façade of the cobbler-novelist Trollope called himself to the artist within, 254 the “artist in hiding.” But he makes no such confident assertion of Trollope’s major status as another recent writer, James Kincaid, who in an article for Nineteenth-Century Fiction called “Bring back The Trollopian,” boldly sug­ gested that Dickens, Joyce and James are easy cases for criticism, but more sophisticated tools are required to deal with “high art-— George Eliot, Tol­ stoy, Trollope.” Terry, by contrast, is quick to acknowledge Trollope’s “ lesser rank” in comparison with George Eliot (38), and “the weaknesses of his per­ ception which in the end limit his achievement” (88). In fact, Terry undersells his subject, and to some extent at the expense of his own argument. One matter in which he undertakes to reverse accepted views is in his refutation of Michael Sadleir’s assessment of Trollope’s reputa­ tion in his Trollope: A Commentary of 1927, still a major and usually reliable source of information. Sadleir, Terry convincingly demonstrates, overesti­ mated the extent to which Trollope was in eclipse in the late years, and drastically exaggerated the unpopularity of the novels in the early decades of this century. He wrote in the role of one championing an unpopular cause, when a Trollope revival was well under way. We are in the midst of another Trollope revival today, but Terry still has the “ unnecessarily apologetic tone” which he identifies in...