116
PARTISAN REVIEW
plained genius, which is only an elaborate way of saying that all we
know of her, or that should concern us, is her work. The critic needs no
apparatus to deal with her except his own intell,igence; if this is supreme
he has everything. She appears so
ea~y
to treat that every few years
there is a book about her. These studies are always the occas\on for
pleasant well-turned reviews that have the happy air of great learning
lightly worn. The readers of the reviews are delighted; a kingdom has
been surveyed at a glance. Some even reread her, the arithmetic of the
thing being so attractive: each book is a significant fraction of the total
work.
As the smallness of Jane Austen's production gives it the appear–
ance of fastidious artistry and keeps it alive, so the sheer bulk of Trol–
lope makes us certain that he was a careless and slovenly workman and
causes him to be largely neglected. Trollope's unfortunate admission in
his
Autobiography
that he wrote so many words an hour and so many
hours a day and that if he finished a novel before the end of his daily
working time· he began a new one the very same day, ruined his reputa–
tion. Without reading a line we are certain that such work must be crude
and superficial; we know (but I am never quite sure how) that inspira–
tion cannot possibly be as regular as clockwork. It is true that he could
not have achieved
his
huge volume without his daily regularity, but this
only proves that he wrote too much to be good.
·
Actually he needed space. For Trollope is not a serious marriage–
broker, like Jane Austen; his interest in the virtuous female heart is
rather superficial; the businesses in which he is really interested and which
he really knows are those of being a bishop, poor clergyman, prime
minister, farmer, civil servant, duke, stockbroker, foxhunting gentleman
or lawyer-and these affairs demand fullness of presentation. A very
large book, a much larger one than could probably get itself published,
would be necessary for the adequate treatment of all of his work. Critical
studies of individual authors tend to be of a size, just as atlases allot a
page to each country no matter how much of the earth's surface it covers.
The resulting: differences in scale make the small subject stand out clear–
ly, while the large one comes out crowded and confused. The critic does
not have the atlas' obligation of universality-the principle of taste was
invented to make him free of it-and may stay away from large countries.
He finds Trollope (to use the words T. S. Eliot once applied to both
Russia and the United States) "a large flat country which no one wants
to visit."
The critic may entirely avoid a subject; but if he undertakes it at
all, he must be universal in it. It will do him no good to know part of it.
I have heard it said privately by people well qualified to speak (except
for the fact that they have probably read only a dozen of Trollope's
novels) that
The Small House at Allington
is one of the finest English
novels of the nineteenth century-if only for the wonderful parallel,
