ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S NOVELS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13583, 12 September 1908, Page 5 (Supplement)

ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S NOVELS.

Trollope died in 1882. barely 30 rears ago, and since that time his novels have been steadily going out of fashion. Yet Trollope was the most popular novelist, of his day, "FramJey Parsonage" is well worth a second peroral, and has—in common with the rest of its author's productions ties which are often sadly to seek in much of the current fiction of to-day. For one thing, Trollope had an admirable narrative style—lucid and easy, cultivated, yet wholly free from that palpable straining after the appropriate word which tiresomely diverts the reader's mind from the thing written to the cleverness of the writer. And his characterisation is marvellous: diverse without effort, as Nature herself is diverse. He writes of squires and parsons, of ordinary men and their ordinary wives, of pretty girls in no way remarkable, and of their lovers, who are for the most part quite everyday sort of young men. And the strange thing is that we know these people, and remember them apart quite easily. " This fellow Trollope," said a delightful contemporary, "just takes a lump of English earth and puts it under a glass case for you to look at." The criticism is absolutely just. In this photographic fidelity to actual life lay the charm of Tro!lope's art for his own generation ; in it lies possibly the secret of its failure to keep its hold upon our own. A great imaginative artist he certainly was not. But it may well he that as a chronicler he will ultimately take a far higher place than the present- generation is apt to concede to him.

For the reason why he is no longer popular is precisely the reason why we no longer admire crinolines and spoon bonnets. They are too remote to suit our ideas of fashion too near to appeal to our sense of the picturesque. It is a fact that young gentlemen fell desperately in love with young ladies thus bedizened; that young ladies saw something godlike" in young gentlemen who put on absurd top hats to go for a country stroll, and prided themselves on the possession, of immense curly whiskers. Do we not all remember George Osborne's beautiful whiskers, which curled themselves round the heart of poor Emmy? It mav be that a* later generation will discover picturesqueness and grace in early Victorian costumes; our own looks for the picturesque a stage farther back— in the high waists, skimp skirts, and curls which the crinolined ladies, no doubt, thought highly ridiculous. Did not the fashionable world object to Miss Dunstable's curls? and is it not recorded how that lively lady retorted that they would pass muster as long as they were done up in banknotes? We live in an age of rapid change— rapid progress we love :- . call —and the England of to-day is not the England Trollope drew in matters social, political, or ecclesiastical, though it lias likeness enough to give to what was faithful to fact when it was written a sort of artificiality to the modern reader. And, when the crinolined ladies and whiskered gentlemen have retreated a little farther into perspective, it will be no small thing that in the writings of the most prolific novelist of the nineteenth century, we have a picture with "nothing extenuate, naught set down in malice," of ordinary English society through by far the greater part of it.