Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1883 — Anthony Trollope’s Wonderful Fertility. [ARTICLE]

Anthony Trollope’s Wonderful Fertility.

He published too much; the writing of novels had ended by becoming, with him, a perceptibly mechanical process. Dickens was prolific; Thackeray produced with a freedom for which we are constantly grateful; but we feel that these writers had their ’periods of gestation. They took more time to look at their subject; relatively (for to-day there is not much leisure, at best, for those who undertake to entertain a hungry public) they were able to wait for inspiration. Trollope's fecundity was prodigious; there was no limit to the work he was ready to do. It is not unjust to say that he sacrificed quality to quantity. Abundance, certainly, is in itself a great merit; almost all the greatest writers have been abundant. But Trollope’s fertility was fantastic, incredible; he himself contended, we believe, that he had given to the world a greater number of- printed pages of fiction than any of his literary contemporaries. Not only did his novels /follow each other without visible intermission, overlapping and treading on each other’s, heels, but most of these works are of extraordinary length. “Orley Farm,” “Can You Forgive Her?” “He Knew He Was Eight,” are exceedingly voluminous tales. “The Way We Live Now” Is one of the longest of modern novels. Trollope produced, moreover, in the intervals of larger labor, a great number of short stories, many of them charming, as well as various books of travel and two or three biographies. He was the great improwisatore of these latter years. Two distinguished story-tellers of the other sex—one in France and one in England—have shown an extiaorSJnai’y facility of composition; but Trollope’s pace Was brisker even than that of the wonderful Madame Sand and the delightful Mrs. Oliphant. He had taught himself to keep thi-3 pace and had reduced his admirable faculty to a habit. Every day of his life he wrote a certain number of pages of his current tale, independent of mood and place. It was once the fortune of the author of these lines to cross the Atlantic, in his company, and he has never forgotten the magnificent example of stiff persistence which it was in the power* of the eminent novelist to give on that occasion. The season lyas unpropitious, the vessel overcrowded, the voyage detestable; but Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning for a purpose which, on the part of a distinguished writer who was also an invulnerable sailor, could only be •. communion with the muse. He drove his pen as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in MontagueSquare; and, as his voyages were many, it was his practice before sailing to come down to the ship and confer with the carpenter, who was instructed to rig up a rough writing-table in his small sea-chamber. Trollope has been accused of being deficient in imagination; but, in the face of such a fact as that, the charge will scarcely seem just. The power to shut one’s eyes, one’s ears (to say nothing of another sense) upon the scenery of a pitching Cunarder and open them upon the loves and sorrows of Lily Dale, on the conjugal embarrassments of Lady Glencora ,Palliser, is certainly a faculty w/fiich has an element of the magical. The imagination that Trollope possessed he had, at. least,' thoroughly at his command. I speak of all this in order to explain (in part) why it was that, with his extraordinary gift, there was always in him a certain touch of the common. He abused his gift, overworked it, rode his horse too hard. As an artist, he never took himself seriously; many people will say this was why he was so delightful.— Henry James, in the Century.