ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 13, 23 December 1911, Page 15

ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

The late Dr. Richard Garnett, in estimating tho qualities as a novelist of Anthony Tvollope, said "his works may fall into temporary oblivion, but when tho twentieth century desires to estimate tho nineteenth, thoy will bo disinterred and studied with an attention accorded to no contemporary work of tho kind except, perhaps, George Eliot's 'Middlemarch.'" Tho prophecy (says an English critic) may be a little too sweeping,, but is probably not very wide of the mark. Wo havo been Temindcd of it by tho appearance of a new' and attractive edition of "Phincas Finn" and "Phineas Kedux," which Messrs. Bell havo just issued in four volumes, with an introduction by Mr. Frederic-Harrison. Trollope, it will be romembered, wrote in all about fifty novels, aud it is interesting to note that Mr. Harrison regards tho Finn series as among his best work. In these books, ho says, Trollope has drawn of the period which ho writes, "an astonishing panorama of Parliamentary life, without blunders, or caricatures, or exaggeration. Except for 'Coningsby,' this picture stands unique in our modern literature." This is high praise. But Mr. Harrison docs not claim for Trollope one of the supreme places in tho realm of fiction. He pays him, however, this tribute, which 6ome might do well to ponder: Trollope' deals iu no.abnormal psychologic problems, his persons are never "freaks," with a mysterious past, wandering on the borderland of lunacy and crime. Thero is neither lust nor gutterslang, nor unnatural brutality in any of his books. The "Phineas" series is full of love, sentimental, capricious, passionato; but it is absolutely free from vice as it is from coarseness. There is neither adultery nor seduction, nor indelicacy from title page to finis, though there is billing and cooing going on from tho first page to the last. And then tho style is as manly, as simple, as pure as tho tale. Men and women talk as they do talk in actual life; no doubt in too actual and ordinary a languago, but at least not in conundrums, and tho bedevilled phraseology so dear to the fancy of the modern Osrics. "A set of tales," Mr. Harrison concludes, "which can instruct and amuse a second and a third generation, which is wholesome, easy, humane, may well claim to take its place in the permanent literature of our country; and may givo useful lessons to an age which is too ready to seek out the'cryptic, the morbid, and tho impure." It is to be hoped that Mr. Harrison's estimate may send many readers not only to Trollopo's political novels, but to his books generally.