man, typically English in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes.
His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were
full of good-humoured life and force; and though he was neither witty
nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good
company, having travelled widely, known all sorts of people, and
formed views, usually positive views, on all the subjects of the day,
views which he was prompt to declare and maintain. There was not much
novelty in them--you were disappointed not to find so clever a writer
more original--but they were worth listening to for their solid
common-sense, tending rather to commonplace sense, and you enjoyed the
ardour with which he threw himself into a discussion. Though
boisterous and insistent in his talk, he was free from assumption or
conceit, and gave the impression of liking the world he lived in, and
being satisfied with his own place in it. Neither did one observe in
him that erratic turn which is commonly attributed to literary men. He
was a steady and regular worker, who rose every morning between five
and six to turn out a certain quantity of copy for the printer before
breakfast, enjoying his work, and fond of his own characters--indeed
he declared that he filled his mind with them and saw them moving
before him--yet composing a novel just as other people might compose
tables of statistics. These methodical habits were to some extent due
to his training as a clerk in the Post Office, where he spent the
earlier half of his working life, having retired in 1864. He did not
neglect his duties there, even when occupied in writing, and claimed
to have been the inventor of the pillar letter-box. It was probably in
his tours as an inspector of postal deliveries that he obtained that
knowledge of rural life which gives reality to his pictures of country
society. He turned his Civil Service experiences to account in some of
his stories, giving faithful and characteristic sketches, in _The
Three Clerks_ and _The Small House at Allington_, of different types
of Government officials, a class which is much more of a class in
England than it is in America, though less of a class than it is in
Germany or France. His favourite amusement was hunting, as readers of
his novels know, and until his latest years he might have been seen,
though a heavy weight, following the hounds in Essex once or twice a
week.
When E. A. Freeman wrote a magazine article denouncing the cruelty of
field sports, Trollope replied, defending the amusement he loved. Some
one said it was a collision of two rough diamonds. But the end was
that Freeman invited Trollope to come and stay with him at Wells, and
they became great friends.
Like most of his literary contemporaries, he was a politician, and
indeed a pretty keen one. He once contested in the Liberal interest--in
those days literary men were mostly Liberals--the borough of Beverley in
Yorkshire, a corrupt little place, where bribery proved too strong
for him. It was thereafter disfranchised as a punishment for its
misdeeds; and his costly experiences doubtless suggested the clever
electioneering sketches in the story of _Ralph the Heir_. Thackeray
also was once a Liberal candidate. He stood for the city of Oxford, and
the story was current there for years afterwards how the freemen of
the borough (not an exemplary class of voters) rose to an unwonted
height of virtue by declaring that though they did not understand his
speeches or know who he was, they would vote for him, expecting
nothing, because he was a friend of Mr. Neate's. Trollope showed his
continued interest in public affairs by appearing on the platform at
the great meeting in St. James's Hall in December 1876, which was the
beginning of a vehement party struggle over the Eastern Question that
only ended at the general election of 1880. He was a direct and
forcible speaker, who would have made his way had he entered
Parliament. But as he had no practical experience of politics either in
the House of Commons or as a working member of a party organisation in
a city where contests are keen, the pictures of political life which are
so frequent in his later tales have not much flavour of reality. They
are sketches obviously taken from the outside. Very rarely do even the
best writers of fiction succeed in reproducing any special and
peculiar kind of life and atmosphere. Of the various stories that
purport to describe what goes on in the English Parliament, none
gives to those who know the social conditions and habits of the place
an impression of truth to nature, and the same has often been
remarked with regard to tales of English University life. Trollope,
however, with his quick eye for the superficial aspects of any
society, might have described the House of Commons admirably had he
sat in it himself. He was fond of travel, and between 1862 and 1880
visited the United States, the West Indies, Australia and New
Zealand, and South Africa, about all of which he wrote books which, if
hardly of permanent value, were fresh, vigorous, and eminently
readable, conveying a definite and generally correct impression of the
more obvious social and economic phenomena he found then existing.
His account of the United States, for instance, is excellent, and did
something to make the Americans forgive the asperity with which his
mother had described her experiences there many years before.
Trollope's travel sketches are as much superior in truthfulness to
Froude's descriptions of the same regions as they are inferior in the
allurements of style.
The old classification of novels, based on the two most necessary
elements of a drama, divided them into novels of plot and novels of
character. To these we have of late years added novels of incident
or adventure, novels of conversation, novels of manners, not to
speak of "novels with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets
in disguise. No one doubted to which of these categories Trollope's
work should be referred. There was in his stories as little plot as a
story can well have. The conversations never beamed with humour like
that of Scott, nor glittered with aphorisms like those of George
Meredith. The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, but
seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of contrivance. Character there
was, and, indeed, great fertility in the creation of character, for
there is hardly one of the tales in which three or four at least
of the personages do not stand out as people whom you would know
again if you met them years after. But the conspicuous merit of
Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his own countrymen, is their
value as pictures of contemporary manners. Here he may claim to
have been surpassed by no writer of his own generation. Dickens, with
all his great and splendid gifts, did not describe the society he
lived in. His personages were too unusual and peculiar to speak and
act and think like the ordinary men and women of the nineteenth
century; nor would a foreigner, however much he might enjoy the
exuberant humour and dramatic power with which they are presented,
learn from them much about the ways and habits of the average
Englishman. The everyday life to which the stories are most true
is the life of the lower middle class in London; and some one has
observed that although this class changes less quickly than the
classes above it, it is already unlike that which Dickens saw when
in the 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics have,
indeed, said that Dickens was too great a painter to be a good
photographer, but the two arts are not incompatible, as appears
from the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, portrayed the
peasantry of his own country in _The Antiquary_. Thackeray, again,
though he has described certain sections of the upper or upper
middle class with far more power and delicacy than Trollope ever
reached, does not go beyond those sections, and has little to tell us
about the middle class generally, still less about the classes
beneath them. Trollope was thoroughly at home in the English middle
class and also (though less perfectly) in the upper class; and his
pictures are all the more true to life because there is not that vein
of stern or cynical reflection which runs through Thackeray, and makes
us think less of the story than of the moral. Trollope usually has a
moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and quietly put, that it does
not distract attention from the minor incidents and little touches
of every day which render the sketches lifelike. If even his
best-drawn characters are not far removed from the commonplace
this helps to make them fairly represent the current habits and
notions of their time. They are the same people we meet in the street
or at a dinner-party; and they are mostly seen under no more
exciting conditions than those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis
match, or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking for effect,
or scheming for some petty temporary end; they are not under the
influence of strong passions, or forced into striking situations,
like the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or George Eliot's
novels; and for this reason again they represent faithfully the
ordinary surface of English upper and upper middle class society:
its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, its
snobbishness, its worship of conventionalities, its aloofness from or
condescension to those whom it deems below its own level; and
therewith also its public spirit, its self-helpfulness, its
neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and straightforwardness,
its easy friendliness of manner towards all who stand within the
sacred pale of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one more
skilfully noted and set down those transient tastes and fashions
which are, so to speak, the trimmings of the dress, and which,
transient though they are, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries,
will have an interest for one who, a century or two hence, feels the
same curiosity about our manners as we feel about those of the
subjects of King George the Third. That Trollope will be read at
all fifty years after his death one may hesitate to predict,
considering how comparatively few in the present generation read
Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss Edgeworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and
how much reduced is the number of those who read even Walter Scott
and Thackeray. But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather
from his pages better than from any others an impression of what
everyday life was like in England in the "middle Victorian" period.
The aspects of that life were already, when his latest books were
written, beginning to change, and the features he drew are fast
receding into history. Even the clergy of 1852-1862 are no longer,
except in quiet country districts, the same as the clergy we now see.
People have often compared the personal impressions which eminent
writers make on those who talk to them with the impressions previously
derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning used to
be taken as two instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle
always talked in character: had there been phonographs in his days,
the phonographed "record" might have been printed as part of one of
his books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed unlike what his poems
had made a reader expect: it was only after a long _tete-a-tete_ with
him that the poet whose mind had been learned through his works stood
revealed. Trollope at first caused a similar though less marked
surprise. This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of person who
would trace with a delicate touch the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust
of temper ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. Upon
further knowledge one perceived that the features of Trollope's
talent, facile invention, quick observation, and a strong common-sense
view of things, with little originality or intensity, were really the
dominant features of his character as expressed in talk. Still, though
the man was more of a piece with his books than he had seemed, one
could never quite recognise in him the delineator of Lily Dale.
As a painter of manners he recalls two of his predecessors--one
greater, one less great than himself. In his limitations and in his
fidelity to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he resembles
Miss Austen. He is inferior to her in delicacy of portraiture, in
finish, in atmosphere. No two of his books can be placed on a level
with _Emma_ and _Persuasion_. On the other hand, while he has done for
the years 1850-1870 what Miss Burney did for 1770-1790, most critics
will place him above her both in fertility and in naturalness. Her
characters are apt either to want colour, like the heroines of
_Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs and
Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. Trollope is a realist in
the sense of being, in all but a few of his books, on the lines of
normal humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to succeed, when he
pierces down to the bed-rock of human nature, in rendering the primal
passions either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he attains
actuality by observation rather than by imagination, hardly ever
entering the sphere of poetry.
His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand
characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out
into the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings never raised him far
above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had
surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most
complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are
exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in
the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a
young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the
same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no
story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour
and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went
before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to
be exhausting their invention.
It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's fame might have stood
higher if he had written less. The public which had been delighted
with his earlier groups of novels, and especially with that group in
which _The Warden_ comes first and _Barchester Towers_ second, began
latterly to tire of what they had come to deem the mannerisms of their
favourite, and felt that they now knew the compass of his gifts.
Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always too like himself, he
once or twice attempted to represent more improbable situations and
exceptional personages. But the attempt was not successful. He lost
his touch of ordinary life without getting into any higher region of
poetical truth; and in his latest stories he had begun to return to
his earlier and better manner.
New tendencies, moreover, embodying themselves in new schools, were
already beginning to appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school
of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of the school of
psychological analysis, soon to be followed by Mr. Kipling with a type
of imaginative directness distinctively his own, were beginning to
lead minds and tastes into other directions. The influence of France
was more felt than it had been when Trollope began to write. And what
a contrast between Trollope's manner and that of his chief French
contemporaries, such as Octave Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de
Maupassant! The French novelists, be their faculty of invention
greater or less, at any rate studied their characters with more care
than English writers had usually shown. The characters were fewer,
almost as few as in a classical drama; and the whole action of the
story is carefully subordinated to the development of these
characters, and the placing of them in a critical position which sets
their strength and weakness in the fullest light. There was more of a
judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole in French fiction than
in ours, and therefore more unity of impression was attained.
Trollope, no doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He crowded his
canvas with figures; he pursued the fortunes of three or four sets of
people at the same time, caring little how the fate of the one set
affected that of the others; he made his novel a sort of chronicle
which you might open anywhere and close anywhere, instead of a drama
animated by one idea and converging towards one centre. He neglected
the art which uses incidents small in themselves to lead up to the
_denoument_ and make it more striking. He took little pains with his
diction, seeming not to care how he said what he had to say. These
defects strike those who turn over his pages to-day. But to those who
read him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was redeemed
by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with which the story moved, the
freshness and faithfulness of its pictures of character and manners.
-----
[21] Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen
of self-portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and
leaves an agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard
Garnett has written well of him in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_.
JOHN RICHARD GREEN[22]
John Richard Green was born in Oxford on 12th December 1837, and
educated first at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, for a short
time, at a private tutor's. He was a singularly quick and bright boy,
and at sixteen obtained by competition a scholarship at Jesus College,
Oxford, where he began to reside in 1856. The members of that college
were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and thereby somewhat cut
off from the rest of the University. They saw little of men in other
colleges, so that a man might have a reputation for ability in his own
society without gaining any in the larger world of Oxford. It so
happened with Green. Though his few intimate friends perceived his
powers, they had so little intercourse with the rest of the
University, either by way of breakfasts and wine-parties, or at the
University debating society, or in athletic sports, that he remained
unknown even to those among his contemporaries who were interested in
the same things, and would have most enjoyed his acquaintance. The
only eminent person who seems to have appreciated and influenced him
was Dean Stanley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon
of Christ Church. Green had attended Stanley's lectures, and Stanley,
whose kindly interest in young men never failed, was struck by him,
and had some share in turning his studies towards history. He
graduated in 1860, having refused to compete for honours, because he
had not received from those who were then tutors of the college the
recognition to which he was entitled.
In 1860 he was ordained, and became curate in London at St. Barnabas,
King's Square, whence, after two years' experience, and one or two
temporary engagements, including the sole charge of a parish in
Hoxton, he was appointed in 1865 to the incumbency of St. Philip's,
Stepney, a district church in one of the poorest parts of London,
where the vicar's income was ill-proportioned to the claims which
needy parishioners made upon him. Here he worked with zeal and
assiduity for about three years, gaining an insight into the condition
and needs of the poor which scholars and historians seldom obtain. He
learnt, in fact, to know men, and the real forces that sway them; and
he used to say in later life that he was conscious how much this had
helped him in historical writing. Gibbon, as every one knows, makes a
similar remark about his experience as a captain in the Hampshire
militia.
Green threw the whole force of his nature into the parish schools,
spending some part of every day in them; he visited incessantly, and
took an active part in the movement for regulating and controlling
private charity which led to the formation of the Charity Organisation
Society. An outbreak of cholera and period of distress among the poor
which occurred during his incumbency drew warm-hearted men from other
parts of London to give their help to the clergy of the East End.
Edward Denison, who was long affectionately remembered by many who
knew him in Oxford and London, chose Green's parish to work in, and
the two friends confirmed one another in their crusade against
indiscriminate and demoralising charity. It was at this time that
Green, who spent upon the parish nearly all that he received as vicar,
found himself obliged to earn some money by other means, and began to
write for the _Saturday Review_. The addition of this labour to the
daily fatigues of his parish duties told on his health, which had
always been delicate, and made him willingly accept from Archbishop
Tait, who had early marked and learned to value his abilities, the
post of librarian at Lambeth. He quitted Stepney, and never took any
other clerical work.
Although physical weakness was one of the causes which compelled this
step, there was also another. He had been brought up in Tractarian
views, and is said to have been at one time on the point of entering
the Church of Rome. This tendency passed off, and before he went to
St. Philip's he had become a Broad Churchman, and was much influenced
by the writings of Mr. F. D. Maurice, whom he knew and used frequently
to meet, and whose pure and noble character, even more perhaps than
his preaching, had profoundly impressed him. However, his restless
mind did not stop long at that point. The same tendency which had
carried him away from Tractarianism made him feel less and less at
home in the ministry of the Church of England, and would doubtless
have led him, even had his health been stronger, to withdraw from
clerical duties. After a few years his friends ceased to address
letters to him under the usual clerical epithet; but he continued to
interest himself in ecclesiastical affairs, and always retained a
marked dislike to Nonconformity. Aversions sometimes outlive
attachments.
On leaving Stepney he went to live in lodgings in Beaumont Street,
Marylebone, and divided his time between Lambeth and literary work.
He now during several years wrote a good deal for the _Saturday
Review_, and his articles were among the best which then appeared in
that organ. The most valuable of them were reviews of historical
books, and descriptions from the historical point of view of cities or
other remarkable places, especially English and French towns. Some of
these are masterpieces. Other articles were on social, or what may be
called occasional, topics, and attracted much notice at the time from
their gaiety and lightness of touch, which sometimes seemed to pass
into flippancy. He never wrote upon politics, nor was he in the
ordinary sense of the word a journalist, for with the exception of
these social articles, his work was all done in his own historical
field, and done with as much care and pains as others would bestow on
the composition of a book. Upon this subject I may quote the words of
one of his oldest and most intimate friends (Mr. Stopford Brooke), who
knew all he did in those days.
The real history of this writing for the _Saturday Review_ has
much personal, pathetic, and literary interest.
It was when he was vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney, that he wrote
the most. The income of the place was, I think, L300 a year, and
the poverty of the parish was very great. Mr. Green spent every
penny of this income on the parish. And he wrote--in order to
live, and often when he was wearied out with the work of the day
and late into the night--two, and often three, articles a week for
the _Saturday Review_. It was less of a strain to him than it
would have been to many others, because he wrote with such speed,
and because his capacity for rapidly throwing his subject into
form and his memory were so remarkable. But it was a severe
strain, nevertheless, for one who, at the time, had in him the
beginnings of the disease of which he died.
I was staying with him once for two days, and the first night he
said to me, "I have three articles to write for the _Saturday
Review_, and they must all be done in thirty-six hours." "What are
they?" I said; "and how have you found time to think of them?"
"Well," he answered, "one is on a volume of Freeman's _Norman
Conquest_, another is a 'light middle,' and the last on the
history of a small town in England; and I have worked them all
into form as I was walking to-day about the parish and in London."
One of these studies was finished before two o'clock in the
morning, and while I talked to him; the other two were done the
next day. It is not uncommon to reach such speed, but it is very
uncommon to combine this speed with literary excellence of
composition, and with permanent and careful knowledge. The
historical reviews were of use to, and gratefully acknowledged by,
his brother historians, and frequently extended, in two or three
numbers of the _Saturday Review_, to the length of an article in a
magazine. I used to think them masterpieces of reviewing, and
their one fault was the fault which was then frequent in that
_Review_--over-vehemence in slaughtering its foes. Such reviewing
cannot be fairly described as journalism. It was an historical
scholar speaking to scholars.
Another class of articles written by Mr. Green were articles on
towns in England, France, or Italy. I do not know whether it was
he or Mr. Freeman who introduced this custom of bringing into a
short space the historical aspect of a single town or of a famous
building, and showing how the town or the building recorded its
own history, and how it was linked to general history, but Mr.
Green, at least, began it very early in his articles on Oxford. At
any rate, it was his habit, at this time, whenever he travelled in
England, France, or Italy, to make a study of any town he
visited.
Articles of this kind--and he had them by fifties in his
head--formed the second line of what has been called his
journalism. I should prefer to call them contributions to history.
They are totally different in quality from ordinary journalism.
They are short historical essays.