Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay
may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be
limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes
in Iceland, it should simply run--that Anthony Trollope has no place at
all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the
fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian
romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this
last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend
Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my
sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity,
his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous
popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole
generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the
Victorian writers.
I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew
him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at
the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with
him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was
familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes;
and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was
for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the
famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the
exception of Charlotte Brontë) I have often seen and heard speak in
public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as
friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which
he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by
day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions
as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just
done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my
acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty
years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen
eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in
his posthumous _Autobiography_, and I can almost hear him tell the
anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.
Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book--one of
the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it
is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous
writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his
pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and
what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for--it is his business
to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such
peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is
what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more
hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more
modest _bonhomie_, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous
worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel
hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his
success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has
had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how
he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work
is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased
millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and
he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim
to be a hero; he has no rare qualities--or none but industry and
courage--and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and
undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work--you may
think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas--but that is a true
picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his
clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a
brave soul, a genial companion.
With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took
a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic
discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George
Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony,
"I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for
three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour."
George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought--she who
could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and
destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at
her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together,"
she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope,
"with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my
mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry. It's not the head
that does it--it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the sticking to my
chair!" In his _Autobiography_ he has elaborately explained this
process--how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his
duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page,
counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He
wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than
25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional
drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London
society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town
club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office
reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. _Dr. Thorne_ was
written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was
negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing _Dr.
Thorne_ he began _The Bertrams_. It is one of the most amazing, and
one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one
can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all.
Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is
honest work, the best he could do.
He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary
productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and
rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or
three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three
volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works
produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds
as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never
neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic
public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary
profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists
that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or
if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not
convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve,
and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr.
Crawley, in _The Last Chronicle of Barset_; and if "dogged" could make
a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a
great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not
have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if
every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample
meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any
thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden
within him--this is to tell us palpable nonsense.
Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of
our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and
Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called
good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from
affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks
into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could
indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or
sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes
pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and
women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous
nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It
is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never
anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted
taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true
that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots
are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new,
nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special
aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his
very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain
types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.
One of Trollope's strong points and one source of his popularity was a
command over plain English almost perfect for his own limited purpose.
It is limpid, flexible, and melodious. It never rises into eloquence,
poetry, or power; but it is always easy, clear, simple, and vigorous.
Trollope was not capable of the sustained mastery over style that we
find in _Esmond_, nor had he the wit, passion, and pathos at
Thackeray's command. But of all contemporaries he comes nearest to
Thackeray in easy conversations and in quiet narration of incidents and
motives. Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope is vulgar--for good old
Anthony had a coarse vein: it was in the family:--but as a rule his
language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone.
This was one good result of his enormous rapidity of execution. His
books read from cover to cover, as if they were spoken in one sitting
by an _improvisatore_ in one and the same mood, who never hesitated an
instant for a word, and who never failed to seize the word he wanted.
This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice
and industry both in office work and in literary work. It is a mastery
which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in
the world. How few out of many millions have studied that subtle
mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of
these fluent and pellucid words.
His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently
noticed. It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect
harmony of tone. From the first line to the last, there is never a
sentence or a passage which strikes a discordant note; we are never
worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by fine writing that fails to
"come off." Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over
again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic. This
can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of
Jane Austen, for even Thackeray himself is now and then artificial in
_Esmond_, and the vulgarity of _Yellowplush_ at last becomes fatiguing.
Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane
Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a
charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This
uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest
qualities of style; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or
subtlety. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great
masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst
well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of
Trollope's tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.
In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal. His
characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such
persons utter in actual life. The characters, it is true, are the
average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the
situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below
the ordinary incidents of modern life. But within this very limited
range of incident, and for this very common average of person and
character, the conversations are photographic or stenographic
reproductions of actual speech. His letters, especially his young
ladies' letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic.
We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied
witticisms of the older school. Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and
Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate
speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real
speech than the allocutions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like
natural talk. That has long been discarded. Jane Austen and Thackeray
make their men and women discourse as men and women do. But perhaps
with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit,
humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful. Now, Trollope,
taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with
literal truth to nature.
This photographic realism of conversation is common enough now: but it
has too often the defects of photography; it is bleared, coarse, and
ill-favoured. As we all know, in the new realism a young woman and her
lover talk thus: "Old gal! why so glum?" said he--"It's my luck!" says
she, and flings her straw hat on the floor. That is the new
photographic style, but it does not please us of an older generation.
Now Trollope makes his people utter such phrases as the characters he
presents to us actually use in real life--or rather such phrases as
they did use thirty years ago. And yet, although he hardly ever rises
into eloquence, wit, brilliancy, or sinks into any form of talk either
unnaturally tall, or unnaturally low,--still, the conversations are
just sufficiently pointed, humorous, or characteristic, to amuse the
reader and develop the speaker's character. Trollope in this exactly
hits the happy mean. Like Mr. Woodhouse's gruel, his conversations are
"thin--but not so very thin." He never attempts grandiloquence; but
then he never sinks into the fashionable bathos of--"Sugar in your tea,
dear?"--"Another lump, if you please,"--nor does he fall into the
fashionable realism of--"Dry up, old man!" No! Trollope's characters
speaks with literal nature; and yet with enough of point, humour,
vigour, to make it pleasant reading.
We may at once confess to his faults and limitations. They are plain
enough, constant, and quite incapable of defence. Out of his sixty
works, I should be sorry to pick more than ten as being worth a second
reading, or twenty which are worth a first reading. Nor amongst the
good books could I count any of the last ten years. The range of
characters is limited to the clergy and professional men of a cathedral
city, to the county families and the respectabilities of a quiet
village, to the life of clubs, public offices, and Parliament in
London, and to the ways of "society" as it existed in England in the
third quarter of the present century. The plots are neither new nor
ingenious; the incidents are rarely more than commonplace; the
characters are seldom very powerful, or original, or complex. There
are very few "psychologic problems," very few dramatic situations, very
few revelations of a new world and unfamiliar natures. There are some
natural scenes in Ireland; now and then a cook-maid, a farmer, a
labourer, or a clerk, come on the stage and play their short parts with
faultless demeanour. But otherwise, the entire company appear in the
frock-coats and crinolines of the period, and every scene is played in
silk hats, bonnets, and regulation evening toilette.
But within this limited range of life, this uniformity of "genteel
comedy," Trollope has not seldom given us pieces of inimitable
truthfulness and curious delicacy of observation. The dignitaries of
the cathedral close, the sporting squires, the county magnates, the
country doctors, and the rectory home, are drawn with a precision, a
refinement, an absolute fidelity that only Jane Austen could compass.
There is no caricature, no burlesque, nothing improbable or
over-wrought. The bishop, the dean, the warden, the curate, the
apothecary, the duke, the master of fox-hounds, the bishop's wife, the
archdeacon's lady, the vicar's daughter, the governess, the
undergraduate--all are perfectly true to nature. So, too, are the men
in the clubs in London, the chiefs, subordinates, and clerks in the
public offices, the ministers and members of Parliament, the leaders,
and rank and file of London "society." They never utter a sentence
which is not exactly what such men and women do utter; they do and they
think nothing but what such men and women think and do in real life.
Their habits, conversation, dress, and interests are photographically
accurate, to the point of illusion. It is not high art--but it is art.
The field is a narrow one; the actors are ordinary. But the skill,
grace, and humour with which the scenes are caught, and the absolute
illusion of truthfulness, redeem it from the commonplace.
The stage of Trollope's drama is not a wide one, but it is far wider
than that of Jane Austen. His plots and incidents are sufficiently
trite and ordinary, but they are dramatic and original, if contrasted
with those of _Emma_ or _Mansfield Park_. No one will compare little
Jane's delicate palfrey with Anthony's big-boned hunter; nor would any
one commit the bad taste of treating these quadrupeds as if they were
entered for a race; but a narrow stage and familiar incidents are not
necessarily fatal to true art. If Trollope had done nothing more than
paint ordinary English society with photographic accuracy of detail, it
would not be a great performance. But he has done more than this. In
the Barsetshire series, at any rate, he has risen to a point of drawing
characters with a very subtle insight and delicate intuition. The
warden, the bishop, Mrs. Proudie, Dr. Thorne, Mary Thorne, Lily Dale,
Lady Arabella, and, above all, Mr. Crawley, are characters definitely
conceived, profoundly mastered, and truly portrayed. Trollope
evidently judged Crawley to be his greatest creation, and the _Last
Chronicle of Barset_ to be his principal achievement. In this he was
doubtless right. There are real characters also in the two _Phineas
Finn_ tales. Chiltern, Finn, Glencora Palliser, Laura Kennedy, and
Marie Goesler, are subtly conceived and truly worked out. This is
enough to make a decent reputation, however flat be the interminable
pot-boilers that precede and follow them.
The list of Trollope's real successes is not very long. The six tales
of the Barsetshire cycle, _The Warden_, _Barchester Towers_, _Doctor
Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_, _The Small House at Allington_, _The Last
Chronicle of Barset_, are unquestionably his main achievements; and of
these either _Doctor Thorne_ or _The Last Chronicle_ is the best. The
Crawley story is undoubtedly the finest thing Trollope ever did; but
for myself, I enjoy the unity, completeness, and masterly scheme of
_Doctor Thorne_, and I like Mary Thorne better than any of Trollope's
women. If, to the six Barset tales, we add _Orley Farm_, _The
Claverings_, the two _Phineas Finns_, and the _Eustace Diamonds_, we
shall include, perhaps, more than posterity will ever trouble itself
about, and almost exactly one-fifth of the novels he left behind. The
ten or twelve of Trollope's best will continue to be read, and will, in
a future generation, no doubt, regain not a little of their early
vogue. This will be due, in part, to their own inherent merit as
graceful, truthful, subtle observation of contemporary types, clothed
in a style of transparent ease. Partly, it will be due to this: that
these tales will reproduce for the future certain phases of life in the
nineteenth century in England with minute fidelity and the most literal
realism.
This is no doubt the cause of the revulsion of opinion by which in some
English circles Trollope has suffered of late. If there are fashions,
habits, and tastes which the rising generation is certain to despise,
it is such as were current in the youth of their own parents about
thirty or forty years before them. The collars, the bonnets, the
furniture, the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the
young to be the last word of all that is awkward and "bad form,"
although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain
quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the
emancipated youth of our time all that was "banal" and prosy some
thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven,
or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels
or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no
sexual theorems to solve, with no unique idiosyncrasies to fathom,
without anything unnatural, or sickening, without hospital
nastinesses,--are all, we are assured, unworthy the notice of the youth
of either sex who are really up to date. In the style of the new
pornographic and clinical school of art, the sayings and doings of
wholesome men and women who live in drawing-rooms and regularly dress
before dinner are "beastly rot," and fit for no one but children and
old maids.
But we conservatives of an older school are grateful to Anthony that he
produced for the last generation an immense collection of pleasant
tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident. It was his boast
that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read
without a blush. This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so
often denounced as _passé_. His tales, of course, are full of love,
and the love is not always discreet or virtuous. There are cases of
guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning passion. But
there is not an impure or prurient passage in the whole library of
tales. Much more than this: in the centre of almost every tale, we are
taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl.
In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight more than when he unveils to
us the secret thoughts of a noble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but
who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear brain and a pure will.
In nothing is he more successful; nowhere is he more subtle, more true,
more interesting. In this fine gift, he surpasses all his
contemporaries, and almost all other English novelists. Mary Thorne,
Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts--I would almost add, Martha Dunstable--may not
be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations. But
they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women; and it does one
good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts.
It must be admitted that they are "young ladies," nurtured in the
conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained
in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be "maiden modesty"
thirty or forty years ago. That is their misfortune to-day; it is now
rather silly to be a "young lady" at all, and the old-fashioned "maiden
modesty" of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively
ridiculous. Young women of the present date, we are assured in the
language of our gilded youth, have to be either "jolly girls" or
"crocks"; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not "jolly
girls." Their trials and agonies are not different from those which
may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve
are those which may await any girl at any time. But the subtle touches
with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing
of competing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and
brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral
crisis--are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane
Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality
of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for
the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it
remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned
lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive
so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply
and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations.
Trollope is equally successful with some other social problems and
characters of unstable equilibrium. They are none of them very
profound or exalted studies in psychology; but they are truthful,
natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make
them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating
bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup
of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family
quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than
his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate;
the honest and impulsive youth placed between love and duty; the loving
girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is
torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position
who does not know his own mind; the man with honest principles who is
tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin--all of these
live in the pages of Trollope with perfect truth to nature and reality
of movement. It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly
creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are
absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not
very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters
never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair's-breadth the
probable and natural conduct of such persons.
All this is now said to be commonplace, goody-goody, and Philistine.
There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, crapulous
prostitutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious
souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope. But they who
can exist without these stimulants may find pleasant reading yet in his
best work. _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ is a really good tale which
deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of
fine imaginative work. _Doctor Thorne_ is a sound, pleasant, ingenious
story from beginning to end. It has perhaps the best plot of all
Trollope's books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he
admits not to be his own. I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and
Doctor Thorne as one of his best men. The unity of _Doctor Thorne_ is
very striking and ingenious. The stage is crowded: there are nearly a
score of well-marked characters and five distinct households; but the
whole series works into the same plot; the scene is constantly varied,
and yet there is no double plot or separate companies. Thus, though
the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the
interest and the movement never flag for a page. The machinery is very
simple; the characters are of average strength and merit; the incidents
and issues are ordinary enough. And the general effect is wholesome,
manly, womanly, refined, and true to nature.
The episcopal and capitular group of ecclesiastics round the Cathedral
of Barchester is Trollope's main creation, and is destined to endure
for some time. It is all in its way inimitably true and subtly
graduated from bishop to dean, from dean to canon, and so on through
the whole chapter down to the verger and the porter. The relations of
these dignitaries to each other, the relation of their woman-kind to
each other, the relation of the clerical world to the town world and to
the county world, their conventional etiquette, their jealousies, their
feuds, their scandals, and their entertainments, are all marked with
admirable truth and a refined touch. The relation of the village
respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county
families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious
precision and subtle discrimination. When _The Warden_ appeared just
forty years ago, I happened to be a pupil in the chambers of the late
Sir Henry Maine, then a famous critic of the _Saturday Review_; and I
well remember his interest and delight in welcoming a new writer, from
whom he thought so much might be expected. The relations of London
"Society" to the parliamentary and ministerial world as described in
Trollope's later books are all treated with entire mastery. It is this
thorough knowledge of the organism of English society which specially
distinguishes Trollope. It is a quality in which Thackeray alone is
his equal; and Thackeray himself has drawn no complex social organism
with such consummate completeness as Trollope's Barchester Close. It
is of course purely English, locally true to England only. But it is,
as Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "solid and substantial," "as real as if it
were a great lump out of the earth,"--"just as English as a beefsteak."
What makes all that so strange is this, that when he began to write
novels, Trollope had far less experience than have most cultivated men
of cathedral closes, rectories, and county families. He had never been
to a college, and till past middle life he never had access to the
higher grades of English society. He never at any time, and certainly
not when the Barchester cycle began, had any footing whatever in
clerical circles, and but little intimate acquaintance with young
ladies of birth and refinement in country homes. He never was much
thrown with the young bloods of the army, of the universities, or of
Parliament. He rarely consorted with dukes or county magnates, and he
never lived in the centre of the political world. Yet this rough,
self-taught busy Post-Office surveyor in Ireland, perpetually
travelling about the country on the inspections of his duty, managed to
see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner
histories of the duke's castle and the squire's home, into the secret
musings of the rector's daughter, and into the tangled web of
parliamentary intrigue. He did all this with a perfectly sure and
subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never
perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly
true, never extravagant, never unreal. And, to add to the wonder, you
might meet him for an hour; and, however much you might like his bluff,
hearty, resonant personality, you would have said he was the last man
to have any delicate sympathy with bishops, dukes, or young ladies.
His insight into parliamentary life was surprisingly accurate and deep.
He had not the genius of Disraeli, but his pictures are utterly free
from caricature or distortion of any kind. In his photographic
portraiture of the British Parliament he surpassed all his
contemporaries; and inasmuch as such studies can only have a local and
sectional interest, they have probably injured his popularity and his
art. His conduct of legal intricacies and the ways of lawyers is
singularly correct; and the long and elaborate trial scene in _Phineas
Redux_ is a masterpiece of natural and faithful descriptions of an Old
Bailey criminal trial in which "society" happens to be involved. Yet
of courts of law, as of bishops' palaces, rectory firesides, the
lobbies of Parliament, and ducal "house parties," Trollope could have
known almost nothing except as an occasional and outside observer. The
life of London clubs, the habits and _personnel_ of a public office,
the hunting-field, and the social hierarchy and ten commandments
observed in a country town--these things Trollope knew to the minutest
shade, and he has described them with wonderful truth and zest.
There was a truly pathetic drollery in his violent passion for certain
enjoyments--hunting, whist, and the smoking-room of his club. I cannot
forget the comical rage which he felt at Professor Freeman's attack on
fox-hunting. I am not a sporting man myself; and, though I may look on
fox-hunting as one of the less deadly sins involved in "sport," I know
nothing about it. But it chanced that as a young man I had been
charged with the duty of escorting a certain young lady to a "meet" of
fox-hounds in Essex. A fox was found; but what happened I hardly
remember; save this, that, in the middle of a hot burst, I found myself
alongside of Anthony Trollope, who was shouting and roaring out
"What!--what are you doing here?" And he was never tired of holding me
up to the scorn of the "Universe" club as a deserter from the
principles of Professor Freeman and John Morley. I had taken no part
in the controversy, but it gave him huge delight to have detected such
backsliding in one of the school he detested. Like other sporting men
who imagine that their love of "sport" is a love of nature, when it is
merely a pleasure in physical exercise, Trollope cared little for the
poetic aspect of nature. His books, like Thackeray's, hardly contain a
single fine picture of the country, of the sea, of mountains, or of
rivers. Compared with Fielding, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens,
George Eliot, he is a man blind to the loveliness of nature. To him,
as to other fox-hunters, the country was good or bad as it promised or
did not promise a good "run." Though Trollope was a great traveller,
he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray,
Dickens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures
and scenes of travel. His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight,
his systematic whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and
irrepressible energy in everything--formed one of the marvels of the
last generation. And that such a colossus of blood and bone should
spend his mornings, before we were out of bed, in analysing the
hypersensitive conscience of an archdeacon, the secret confidences
whispered between a prudent mamma and a love-lorn young lady, or the
subtle meanderings of Marie Goesler's heart--this was a real
psychologic problem.
There can be no doubt that this constitutional vehemence of his, this
hypertrophy of blood and muscle, injured his work and dimmed his
reputation. Much of his work he ought to have burnt. His classical
studies are worthless, his _Life of Thackeray_ and his _Travels_ are
mere book-making. His novels, even the best, are revised and printed
with scandalous haste. He speaks of a "_toga virile_" and of "_the
husband of his bosom_," for wife; and there are misprints in every
paragraph. When, in his _Autobiography_, he let the public into the
story of his method, of his mechanical writing so many words per hour,
of his beginning a new tale the day after he finished the last, of his
having no particular plot, and hardly thinking about a plot, and all
the little trade secrets of his factory, the public felt some disgust
and was almost inclined to think it had been cheated out of its 70,000
pounds.
Anthony Trollope was not a fraud, nor even a mere tradesman. His
reputation may perhaps partially revive, and some of his best work may
be read in the next century. His best work will of course be a mere
residuum of his sixty books, as is the best of nearly all prolific
writers. I am inclined to think the permanent survival may be limited
to the _Barchester_ cycle, with _Orley Farm_ and the two _Phineas
Finns_. In any case, his books will hereafter bear a certain
historical interest, as the best record of actual manners in the higher
English society between 1855 and 1875. That value nothing can take
away, however dull, _connu_, and out of date the books may now seem to
our new youth. It is a curious problem why our new youth persists in
filling its stomach with the poorest trash that is "new"--_i.e._
published in 1895, whilst it will not look at a book that is "old
"--_i.e._ published in 1865, though both are equally unknown to the
young reader. If our new youth ever could bring itself to take up a
book having 1865 on its title-page, it might find in the best of
Anthony Trollope much subtle observation, many manly and womanly
natures, unfailing purity of tone, and wholesome enjoyment.
[1] This anecdote has been doubted, on the ground that such rapid
composition is impossible. But Trollope in his _Autobiography_ asserts
this fact, exactly as he told George Eliot, except that the first half
hour was occupied by re-reading the work of the previous day. The
average morning's work was thus 2500 words, written in two and a half
hours.
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