ever heard of, that little pecuniary transaction is the most felicitous.
_Constantius._ You must remember that he had been _en rapport_ with her
at the gaming-table. She had been playing in defiance of his
observation, and he, continuing to observe her, had been in a measure
responsible for her loss. There was a tacit consciousness of this
between them. You may contest the possibility of tacit consciousness
going so far, but that is not a serious objection. You may point out two
or three weak spots in detail; the fact remains that Gwendolen’s whole
history is vividly told. And see how the girl is known, inside out, how
thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the most _intelligent_
thing in all George Eliot’s writing, and that is saying much. It is so
deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a wealth of psychological
detail, it is more than masterly.
_Theodora._ I don’t know where the perception of character has sailed
closer to the wind.
_Pulcheria._ The portrait may be admirable, but it has one little fault.
You don’t care a straw for the original. Gwendolen is not an
interesting girl, and when the author tries to invest her with a deep
tragic interest she does so at the expense of consistency. She has made
her at the outset too light, too flimsy; tragedy has no hold on such a
girl.
_Theodora._ You are hard to satisfy. You said this morning that Dorothea
was too heavy, and now you find Gwendolen too light. George Eliot wished
to give us the perfect counterpart of Dorothea. Having made one portrait
she was worthy to make the other.
_Pulcheria._ She has committed the fatal error of making Gwendolen
vulgarly, pettily, drily selfish. She was _personally_ selfish.
_Theodora._ I know nothing more personal than selfishness.
_Pulcheria._ I am selfish, but I don’t go about with my chin out like
that; at least I hope I don’t. She was an odious young woman, and one
can’t care what becomes of her. When her marriage turned out ill she
would have become still more hard and positive; to make her soft and
appealing is very bad logic. The second Gwendolen doesn’t belong to the
first.
_Constantius._ She is perhaps at the first a little childish for the
weight of interest she has to carry, a little too much after the pattern
of the unconscientious young ladies of Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell.
_Theodora._ Since when it is forbidden to make one’s heroine young?
Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness--its eagerness, its
presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness,
its sense of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and
clever, and therefore tragedy _can_ have a hold upon her. Her conscience
doesn’t make the tragedy; that is an old story and, I think, a secondary
form of suffering. It is the tragedy that makes her conscience, which
then reacts upon it; and I can think of nothing more powerful than the
way in which the growth of her conscience is traced, nothing more
touching than the picture of its helpless maturity.
_Constantius._ That is perfectly true. Gwendolen’s history is admirably
typical--as most things are with George Eliot: it is the very stuff that
human life is made of. What is it made of but the discovery by each of
us that we are at the best but a rather ridiculous fifth wheel to the
coach, after we have sat cracking our whip and believing that we are at
least the coachman in person? We think we are the main hoop to the
barrel, and we turn out to be but a very incidental splinter in one of
the staves. The universe forcing itself with a slow, inexorable pressure
into a narrow, complacent, and yet after all extremely sensitive mind,
and making it ache with the pain of the process--that is Gwendolen’s
story. And it becomes completely characteristic in that her supreme
perception of the fact that the world is whirling past her is in the
disappointment not of a base but of an exalted passion. The very chance
to embrace what the author is so fond of calling a “larger life” seems
refused to her. She is punished for being narrow, and she is not
allowed a chance to expand. Her finding Deronda pre-engaged to go to the
East and stir up the race-feeling of the Jews strikes me as a
wonderfully happy invention. The irony of the situation, for poor
Gwendolen, is almost grotesque, and it makes one wonder whether the
whole heavy structure of the Jewish question in the story was not built
up by the author for the express purpose of giving its proper force to
this particular stroke.
_Theodora._ George Eliot’s intentions are extremely complex. The mass is
for each detail and each detail is for the mass.
_Pulcheria._ She is very fond of deaths by drowning. Maggie Tulliver and
her brother are drowned, Tito Melema is drowned, Mr. Grandcourt is
drowned. It is extremely unlikely that Grandcourt should not have known
how to swim.
_Constantius._ He did, of course, but he had a cramp. It served him
right. I can’t imagine a more consummate representation of the most
detestable kind of Englishman--the Englishman who thinks it low to
articulate. And in Grandcourt the type and the individual are so happily
met: the type with its sense of the proprieties and the individual with
his absence of all sense. He is the apotheosis of dryness, a human
expression of the simple idea of the perpendicular.
_Theodora._ Mr. Casaubon, in _Middlemarch_, was very dry too; and yet
what a genius it is that can give us two disagreeable husbands who are
so utterly different!
_Pulcheria._ You must count the two disagreeable wives too--Rosamond
Vincy and Gwendolen. They are very much alike. I know the author didn’t
mean it; it proves how common a type the worldly, _pincée_, selfish
young woman seemed to her. They are both disagreeable; you can’t get
over that.
_Constantius._ There is something in that, perhaps. I think, at any
rate, that the secondary people here are less delightful than in
_Middlemarch_; there is nothing so good as Mary Garth and her father, or
the little old lady who steals sugar, or the parson who is in love with
Mary, or the country relatives of old Mr. Featherstone. Rex Gascoigne is
not so good as Fred Vincy.
_Theodora._ Mr. Gascoigne is admirable, and Mrs. Davilow is charming.
_Pulcheria._ And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer
“Shakespearean.” Wouldn’t “Wagnerian” be high enough praise?
_Constantius._ Yes, one must make an exception with regard to the
Klesmers and the Meyricks. They are delightful, and as for Klesmer
himself, and Hans Meyrick, Theodora may maintain her epithet.
Shakespearean characters are characters that are born of the _overflow_
of observation--characters that make the drama seem multitudinous, like
life. Klesmer comes in with a sort of Shakespearean “value,” as a
painter would say, and so, in a different tone, does Hans Meyrick. They
spring from a much-peopled mind.
_Theodora._ I think Gwendolen’s confrontation with Klesmer one of the
finest things in the book.
_Constantius._ It is like everything in George Eliot; it will bear
thinking of.
_Pulcheria._ All that is very fine, but you cannot persuade me that
_Deronda_ is not a very ponderous and ill-made story. It has nothing
that one can call a subject. A silly young girl and a solemn, sapient
young man who doesn’t fall in love with her! That is the _donnée_ of
eight monthly volumes. I call it very flat. Is that what the exquisite
art of Thackeray and Miss Austen and Hawthorne has come to? I would as
soon read a German novel outright.
_Theodora._ There is something higher than form--there is spirit.
_Constantius._ I am afraid Pulcheria is sadly æsthetic. She had better
confine herself to Mérimée.
_Pulcheria._ I shall certainly to-day read over _La Double Méprise_.
_Theodora._ Oh, my dear, _y pensez-vous_?
_Constantius._ Yes, I think there is little art in _Deronda_, but I
think there is a vast amount of life. In life without art you can find
your account; but art without life is a poor affair. The book is full of
the world.
_Theodora._ It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite art
enough for me.
_Pulcheria_ (to the little dog). We are silenced, darling, but we are
not convinced, are we? (The pug begins to bark.) No, we are not even
silenced. It’s a young woman with two bandboxes.
_Theodora._ Oh, it must be our muslins.
_Constantius_ (rising to go). I see what you mean!
1876.
IV
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
When, a few months ago, Anthony Trollope laid down his pen for the last
time, it was a sign of the complete extinction of that group of
admirable writers who, in England, during the preceding half century,
had done so much to elevate the art of the novelist. The author of _The
Warden_, of _Barchester Towers_, of _Framley Parsonage_, does not, to
our mind, stand on the very same level as Dickens, Thackeray and George
Eliot; for his talent was of a quality less fine than theirs. But he
belonged to the same family--he had as much to tell us about English
life; he was strong, genial and abundant. 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 gross, importunate; 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 Right_, 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 labour 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 _improvvisatore_ of these
latter years. Two distinguished story-tellers of the other sex--one in
France and one in England--have shown an extraordinary 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 this pace, and had reduced his admirable faculty to a
system. Every day of his life he wrote a certain number of pages of his
current tale, a number sacramental and invariable, 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 plain persistence that it was in the power of the
eminent novelist to give on that occasion. The season was 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 Montague Square; 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 or the conjugal
embarrassments of Lady Glencora Palliser, is certainly a faculty which
could take to itself wings. 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 infusion 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. The people who take themselves seriously are prigs and
bores; and Trollope, with his perpetual “story,” which was the only
thing he cared about, his strong good sense, hearty good nature,
generous appreciation of life in all its varieties, responds in
perfection to a certain English ideal. According to that ideal it is
rather dangerous to be explicitly or consciously an artist--to have a
system, a doctrine, a form. Trollope, from the first, went in, as they
say, for having as little form as possible; it is probably safe to
affirm that he had no “views” whatever on the subject of novel-writing.
His whole manner is that of a man who regards the practice as one of the
more delicate industries, but has never troubled his head nor clogged
his pen with theories about the nature of his business. Fortunately he
was not obliged to do so, for he had an easy road to success; and his
honest, familiar, deliberate way of treating his readers as if he were
one of them, and shared their indifference to a general view, their
limitations of knowledge, their love of a comfortable ending, endeared
him to many persons in England and America. It is in the name of some
chosen form that, of late years, things have been made most disagreeable
for the novel-reader, who has been treated by several votaries of the
new experiments in fiction to unwonted and bewildering sensations. With
Trollope we were always safe; there were sure to be no new experiments.
His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the
usual. This gift is not rare in the annals of English fiction; it would
naturally be found in a walk of literature in which the feminine mind
has laboured so fruitfully. Women are delicate and patient observers;
they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They
feel and perceive the real with a kind of personal tact, and their
observations are recorded in a thousand delightful volumes. Trollope,
therefore, with his eyes comfortably fixed on the familiar, the actual,
was far from having invented a new category; his great distinction is
that in resting there his vision took in so much of the field. And then
he _felt_ all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them
in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness,
their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable
meanings. He never wearied of the pre-established round of English
customs--never needed a respite or a change--was content to go on
indefinitely watching the life that surrounded him, and holding up his
mirror to it. Into this mirror the public, at first especially, grew
very fond of looking--for it saw itself reflected in all the most
credible and supposable ways, with that curiosity that people feel to
know how they look when they are represented, “just as they are,” by a
painter who does not desire to put them into an attitude, to drape them
for an effect, to arrange his light and his accessories. This exact and
on the whole becoming image, projected upon a surface without a strong
intrinsic tone, constitutes mainly the entertainment that Trollope
offered his readers. The striking thing to the critic was that his
robust and patient mind had no particular bias, his imagination no light
of its own. He saw things neither pictorially and grotesquely like
Dickens; nor with that combined disposition to satire and to literary
form which gives such “body,” as they say of wine, to the manner of
Thackeray; nor with anything of the philosophic, the transcendental
cast--the desire to follow them to their remote relations--which we
associate with the name of George Eliot. Trollope had his elements of
fancy, of satire, of irony; but these qualities were not very highly
developed, and he walked mainly by the light of his good sense, his
clear, direct vision of the things that lay nearest, and his great
natural kindness. There is something remarkably tender and friendly in
his feeling about all human perplexities; he takes the good-natured,
temperate, conciliatory view--the humorous view, perhaps, for the most
part, yet without a touch of pessimistic prejudice. As he grew older,
and had sometimes to go farther afield for his subjects, he acquired a
savour of bitterness and reconciled himself sturdily to treating of the
disagreeable. A more copious record of disagreeable matters could
scarcely be imagined, for instance, than _The Way We Live Now_. But, in
general, he has a wholesome mistrust of morbid analysis, an aversion to
inflicting pain. He has an infinite love of detail, but his details are,
for the most part, the innumerable items of the expected. When the
French are disposed to pay a compliment to the English mind they are so
good as to say that there is in it something remarkably _honnête_. If I
might borrow this epithet without seeming to be patronising, I should
apply it to the genius of Anthony Trollope. He represents in an eminent
degree this natural decorum of the English spirit, and represents it all
the better that there is not in him a grain of the mawkish or the
prudish. He writes, he feels, he judges like a man, talking plainly and
frankly about many things, and is by no means destitute of a certain
saving grace of coarseness. But he has kept the purity of his
imagination and held fast to old-fashioned reverences and preferences.
He thinks it a sufficient objection to several topics to say simply that
they are unclean. There was nothing in his theory of the story-teller’s
art that tended to convert the reader’s or the writer’s mind into a
vessel for polluting things. He recognised the right of the vessel to
protest, and would have regarded such a protest as conclusive. With a
considerable turn for satire, though this perhaps is more evident in his
early novels than in his later ones, he had as little as possible of the
quality of irony. He never played with a subject, never juggled with the
sympathies or the credulity of his reader, was never in the least
paradoxical or mystifying. He sat down to his theme in a serious,
business-like way, with his elbows on the table and his eye occasionally
wandering to the clock.
To touch successively upon these points is to attempt a portrait, which
I shall perhaps not altogether have failed to produce. The source of his
success in describing the life that lay nearest to him, and describing
it without any of those artistic perversions that come, as we have said,
from a powerful imagination, from a cynical humour or from a desire to
look, as George Eliot expresses it, for the suppressed transitions that
unite all contrasts, the essence of this love of reality was his extreme
interest in character. This is the fine and admirable quality in
Trollope, this is what will preserve his best works in spite of those
flatnesses which keep him from standing on quite the same level as the
masters. Indeed this quality is so much one of the finest (to my mind at
least), that it makes me wonder the more that the writer who had it so
abundantly and so naturally should not have just that distinction which
Trollope lacks, and which we find in his three brilliant contemporaries.
If he was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold that he was), it was
in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties. His
knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observation of the common
behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned nor acquired, not even
particularly studied. All human doings deeply interested him, human
life, to his mind, was a perpetual story; but he never attempted to take
the so-called scientific view, the view which has lately found ingenious
advocates among the countrymen and successors of Balzac. He had no airs
of being able to tell you _why_ people in a given situation would
conduct themselves in a particular way; it was enough for him that he
felt their feelings and struck the right note, because he had, as it
were, a good ear. If he was a knowing psychologist he was so by grace;
he was just and true without apparatus and without effort. He must have
had a great taste for the moral question; he evidently believed that
this is the basis of the interest of fiction. We must be careful, of
course, in attributing convictions and opinions to Trollope, who, as I
have said, had as little as possible of the pedantry of his art, and
whose occasional chance utterances in regard to the object of the
novelist and his means of achieving it are of an almost startling
simplicity. But we certainly do not go too far in saying that he gave
his practical testimony in favour of the idea that the interest of a
work of fiction is great in proportion as the people stand on their
feet. His great effort was evidently to make them stand so; if he
achieved this result with as little as possible of a flourish of the
hand it was nevertheless the measure of his success. If he had taken
sides on the droll, bemuddled opposition between novels of character and
novels of plot, I can imagine him to have said (except that he never
expressed himself in epigrams), that he preferred the former class,
inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no means
character. It is more safe indeed to believe that his great good sense
would have prevented him from taking an idle controversy seriously.
Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action
is plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to
interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our
emotion, our suspense, by means of personal references. We care what
happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
Trollope’s great apprehension of the real, which was what made him so
interesting, came to him through his desire to satisfy us on this
point--to tell us what certain people were and what they did in
consequence of being so. That is the purpose of each of his tales; and
if these things produce an illusion it comes from the gradual abundance
of his testimony as to the temper, the tone, the passions, the habits,
the moral nature, of a certain number of contemporary Britons.