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"All human doings deeply interested him, human life, to his mind, was a perpetual story."
-Henry James, "Anthony Trollope." (PP 104)
Anthony Trollope and Henry James would seem the perfect literary odd couple: one careless, the other fastidious, one perceived as vulgar, the other as morbidly sensitive to vulgarity, one characterized as an awkward big-bodied lummox of a man, the other, especially in the late portrait so frequently reproduced, as having the ascetic profile of a monk. One can hardly imagine two more antithetical figures. This was an opposition that James helped establish and maintain: "In arguing for and explaining his own methodology and his own aesthetics, it suits James to sharpen his distinctions by inventing some opposition, some fixed symbol for alternate methods and assumptions. He called this symbol Trollope" (Kincaid 7). Kincaid is referring here to the vitriolic reviews of Trollope's work that James published in the Nation in 1865 and 1866 just as he was beginning his own career as a writer of fiction. (James's first short story was published in 1864, his second in March of 1865. His first three reviews of Trollope's novels appeared in July and September of 1865 and January of 1866.)' The terms of those reviews-as well as of the more modulated assessment of Trollope James first published in Century Magazine and later collected in Partial Portraits-their extreme, almost excessively personal tone, suggests that we might read them not just as criticism but as position papers in which James, in working through his response to Trollope, grasps something about the novels he himself intends to write.2 A comparison of Trollope's The Prime Minister and James's The Portrait of a Lady bears out the idea that, improbably, Trollope's "vulgar" novels inspired some of James's more abstract, refined, and delicate prose.
James was famous for having condemned Trollope's vulgarity, arguing in his review of Miss Mackenzie that "Life is vulgar, but we know not how vulgar it is till we see it set down in his pages," that "He has deliberately selected vulgar illustrations," and asking "Why should we follow the fortunes of such people? They vulgarize experience and other heavenly gifts" (NR 71, 72, 75). A rather long passage from the postscript to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction provides the...