surprising, the exceptional, the complicated; as a general thing he has
no great story to tell. The thing is not so much a story as a picture;
if we hesitate to call it a picture it is because the idea of
composition is not the controlling one and we feel that the author would
regard the artistic, in general, as a kind of affectation. There is not
even much description, in the sense which the present votaries of
realism in France attach to that word. The painter lays his scene in a
few deliberate, not especially pictorial strokes, and never dreams of
finishing the piece for the sake of enabling the reader to hang it up.
The finish, such as it is, comes later, from the slow and somewhat
clumsy accumulation of small illustrations. These illustrations are
sometimes of the commonest; Trollope turns them out inexhaustibly,
repeats them freely, unfolds them without haste and without rest. But
they are all of the most obvious sort, and they are none the worse for
that. The point to be made is that they have no great spectacular
interest (we beg pardon of the innumerable love-affairs that Trollope
has described), like many of the incidents, say, of Walter Scott and of
Alexandre Dumas: if we care to know about them (as repetitions of a
usual case), it is because the writer has managed, in his candid,
literal, somewhat lumbering way, to tell us that about the men and women
concerned which has already excited on their behalf the impression of
life. It is a marvel by what homely arts, by what imperturbable
button-holing persistence, he contrives to excite this impression. Take,
for example, such a work as _The Vicar of Bullhampton_. It would be
difficult to state the idea of this slow but excellent story, which is a
capital example of interest produced by the quietest conceivable means.
The principal persons in it are a lively, jovial, high-tempered country
clergyman, a young woman who is in love with her cousin, and a small,
rather dull squire who is in love with the young woman. There is no
connection between the affairs of the clergyman and those of the two
other persons, save that these two are the Vicar’s friends. The Vicar
gives countenance, for Christian charity’s sake, to a young countryman
who is suspected (falsely, as it appears), of murder, and also to the
lad’s sister, who is more than suspected of leading an immoral life.
Various people are shocked at his indiscretion, but in the end he is
shown to have been no worse a clergyman because he is a good fellow. A
cantankerous nobleman, who has a spite against him, causes a Methodist
conventicle to be erected at the gates of the vicarage; but afterward,
finding that he has no title to the land used for this obnoxious
purpose, causes the conventicle to be pulled down, and is reconciled
with the parson, who accepts an invitation to stay at the castle. Mary
Lowther, the heroine of _The Vicar of Bullhampton_, is sought in
marriage by Mr. Harry Gilmore, to whose passion she is unable to
respond; she accepts him, however, making him understand that she does
not love him, and that her affections are fixed upon her kinsman,
Captain Marrable, whom she would marry (and who would marry her), if he
were not too poor to support a wife. If Mr. Gilmore will take her on
these terms she will become his spouse; but she gives him all sorts of
warnings. They are not superfluous; for, as Captain Marrable presently
inherits a fortune, she throws over Mr. Gilmore, who retires to foreign
lands, heart-broken, inconsolable. This is the substance of _The Vicar
of Bullhampton_; the reader will see that it is not a very tangled
skein. But if the interest is gradual it is extreme and constant, and it
comes altogether from excellent portraiture. It is essentially a moral,
a social interest. There is something masterly in the large-fisted grip
with which, in work of this kind, Trollope handles his brush. The
Vicar’s nature is thoroughly analysed and rendered, and his monotonous
friend the Squire, a man with limitations, but possessed and consumed by
a genuine passion, is equally near the truth.
Trollope has described again and again the ravages of love, and it is
wonderful to see how well, in these delicate matters, his plain good
sense and good taste serve him. His story is always primarily a
love-story, and a love-story constructed on an inveterate system. There
is a young lady who has two lovers, or a young man who has two
sweethearts; we are treated to the innumerable forms in which this
predicament may present itself and the consequences, sometimes pathetic,
sometimes grotesque, which spring from such false situations. Trollope
is not what is called a colourist; still less is he a poet: he is seated
on the back of heavy-footed prose. But his account of those sentiments
which the poets are supposed to have made their own is apt to be as
touching as demonstrations more lyrical. There is something wonderfully
vivid in the state of mind of the unfortunate Harry Gilmore, of whom I
have just spoken; and his history, which has no more pretensions to
style than if it were cut out of yesterday’s newspaper, lodges itself in
the imagination in all sorts of classic company. He is not handsome, nor
clever, nor rich, nor romantic, nor distinguished in any way; he is
simply rather a dense, narrow-minded, stiff, obstinate, common-place,
conscientious modern Englishman, exceedingly in love and, from his own
point of view, exceedingly ill-used. He is interesting because he
suffers and because we are curious to see the form that suffering will
take in that particular nature. Our good fortune, with Trollope, is that
the person put before us will have, in spite of opportunities not to
have it, a certain particular nature. The author has cared enough about
the character of such a person to find out exactly what it is. Another
particular nature in _The Vicar of Bullhampton_ is the surly, sturdy,
sceptical old farmer Jacob Brattle, who doesn’t want to be patronised by
the parson, and in his dumb, dusky, half-brutal, half-spiritual
melancholy, surrounded by domestic troubles, financial embarrassments
and a puzzling world, declines altogether to be won over to clerical
optimism. Such a figure as Jacob Brattle, purely episodical though it
be, is an excellent English portrait. As thoroughly English, and the
most striking thing in the book, is the combination, in the nature of
Frank Fenwick--the delightful Vicar--of the patronising, conventional,
clerical element with all sorts of manliness and spontaneity; the union,
or to a certain extent the contradiction, of official and personal
geniality. Trollope touches these points in a way that shows that he
knows his man. Delicacy is not his great sign, but when it is necessary
he can be as delicate as any one else.
I alighted, just now, at a venture, upon the history of Frank Fenwick;
it is far from being a conspicuous work in the immense list of
Trollope’s novels. But to choose an example one must choose arbitrarily,
for examples of almost anything that one may wish to say are numerous to
embarrassment. In speaking of a writer who produced so much and produced
always in the same way, there is perhaps a certain unfairness in
choosing at all. As no work has higher pretensions than any other, there
may be a certain unkindness in holding an individual production up to
the light. “Judge me in the lump,” we can imagine the author saying; “I
have only undertaken to entertain the British public. I don’t pretend
that each of my novels is an organic whole.” Trollope had no time to
give his tales a classic roundness; yet there is (in spite of an
extraordinary defect), something of that quality in the thing that first
revealed him. _The Warden_ was published in 1855. It made a great
impression; and when, in 1857, _Barchester Towers_ followed it, every
one saw that English literature had a novelist the more. These were not
the works of a young man, for Anthony Trollope had been born in 1815. It
is remarkable to reflect, by the way, that his prodigious fecundity (he
had published before _The Warden_ three or four novels which attracted
little attention), was enclosed between his fortieth and his
sixty-seventh years. Trollope had lived long enough in the world to
learn a good deal about it; and his maturity of feeling and evidently
large knowledge of English life were for much in the effect produced by
the two clerical tales. It was easy to see that he would take up room.
What he had picked up, to begin with, was a comprehensive, various
impression of the clergy of the Church of England and the manners and
feelings that prevail in cathedral towns. This, for a while, was his
speciality, and, as always happens in such cases, the public was
disposed to prescribe to him that path. He knew about bishops,
archdeacons, prebendaries, precentors, and about their wives and
daughters; he knew what these dignitaries say to each other when they
are collected together, aloof from secular ears. He even knew what sort
of talk goes on between a bishop and a bishop’s lady when the august
couple are enshrouded in the privacy of the episcopal bedroom. This
knowledge, somehow, was rare and precious. No one, as yet, had been bold
enough to snatch the illuminating torch from the very summit of the
altar. Trollope enlarged his field very speedily--there is, as I
remember that work, as little as possible of the ecclesiastical in the
tale of _The Three Clerks_, which came after _Barchester Towers_. But he
always retained traces of his early divination of the clergy; he
introduced them frequently, and he always did them easily and well.
There is no ecclesiastical figure, however, so good as the first--no
creation of this sort so happy as the admirable Mr. Harding. _The
Warden_ is a delightful tale, and a signal instance of Trollope’s habit
of offering us the spectacle of a character. A motive more delicate,
more slender, as well as more charming, could scarcely be conceived. It
is simply the history of an old man’s conscience.
The good and gentle Mr. Harding, precentor of Barchester Cathedral, also
holds the post of warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an ancient charity where
twelve old paupers are maintained in comfort. The office is in the gift
of the bishop, and its emoluments are as handsome as the duties of the
place are small. Mr. Harding has for years drawn his salary in quiet
gratitude; but his moral repose is broken by hearing it at last begun to
be said that the wardenship is a sinecure, that the salary is a scandal,
and that a large part, at least, of his easy income ought to go to the
pensioners of the hospital. He is sadly troubled and perplexed, and when
the great London newspapers take up the affair he is overwhelmed with
confusion and shame. He thinks the newspapers are right--he perceives
that the warden is an overpaid and rather a useless functionary. The
only thing he can do is to resign the place. He has no means of his
own--he is only a quiet, modest, innocent old man, with a taste, a
passion, for old church-music and the violoncello. But he determines to
resign, and he does resign in spite of the sharp opposition of his
friends. He does what he thinks right, and goes to live in lodgings over
a shop in the Barchester High Street. That is all the story, and it has
exceeding beauty. The question of Mr. Harding’s resignation becomes a
drama, and we anxiously wait for the catastrophe. Trollope never did
anything happier than the picture of this sweet and serious little old
gentleman, who on most of the occasions of life has shown a lamblike
softness and compliance, but in this particular matter opposes a silent,
impenetrable obstinacy to the arguments of the friends who insist on his
keeping his sinecure--fixing his mild, detached gaze on the distance,
and making imaginary passes with his fiddle-bow while they demonstrate
his pusillanimity. The subject of _The Warden_, exactly viewed, is the
opposition of the two natures of Archdeacon Grantley and Mr. Harding,
and there is nothing finer in all Trollope than the vividness with which
this opposition is presented. The archdeacon is as happy a portrait as
the precentor--an image of the full-fed, worldly churchman, taking his
stand squarely upon his rich temporalities, and regarding the church
frankly as a fat social pasturage. It required the greatest tact and
temperance to make the picture of Archdeacon Grantley stop just where it
does. The type, impartially considered, is detestable, but the
individual may be full of amenity. Trollope allows his archdeacon all
the virtues he was likely to possess, but he makes his spiritual
grossness wonderfully natural. No charge of exaggeration is possible,
for we are made to feel that he is conscientious as well as arrogant,
and expansive as well as hard. He is one of those figures that spring
into being all at once, solidifying in the author’s grasp. These two
capital portraits are what we carry away from _The Warden_, which some
persons profess to regard as our writer’s masterpiece. We remember,
while it was still something of a novelty, to have heard a judicious
critic say that it had much of the charm of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
Anthony Trollope would not have accepted the compliment, and would not
have wished this little tale to pass before several of its successors.
He would have said, very justly, that it gives too small a measure of
his knowledge of life. It has, however, a certain classic roundness,
though, as we said a moment since, there is a blemish on its fair face.
The chapter on Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment would be a
mistake almost inconceivable if Trollope had not in other places taken
pains to show us that for certain forms of satire (the more violent,
doubtless), he had absolutely no gift. Dr. Anticant is a parody of
Carlyle, and Mr. Sentiment is an exposure of Dickens: and both these
little _jeux d’esprit_ are as infelicitous as they are misplaced. It was
no less luckless an inspiration to convert Archdeacon Grantley’s three
sons, denominated respectively Charles James, Henry and Samuel, into
little effigies of three distinguished English bishops of that period,
whose well-known peculiarities are reproduced in the description of
these unnatural urchins. The whole passage, as we meet it, is a sudden
disillusionment; we are transported from the mellow atmosphere of an
assimilated Barchester to the air of ponderous allegory.
I may take occasion to remark here upon a very curious fact--the fact
that there are certain precautions in the way of producing that illusion
dear to the intending novelist which Trollope not only habitually
scorned to take, but really, as we may say, asking pardon for the heat
of the thing, delighted wantonly to violate. He took a suicidal
satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was
only, after all, a make-believe. He habitually referred to the work in
hand (in the course of that work) as a novel, and to himself as a
novelist, and was fond of letting the reader know that this novelist
could direct the course of events according to his pleasure. Already, in
_Barchester Towers_, he falls into this pernicious trick. In describing
the wooing of Eleanor Bold by Mr. Arabin he has occasion to say that the
lady might have acted in a much more direct and natural way than the way
he attributes to her. But if she had, he adds, “where would have been my
novel?” The last chapter of the same story begins with the remark, “The
end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner party, must be made
up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.” These little slaps at credulity (we
might give many more specimens) are very discouraging, but they are even
more inexplicable; for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged
from the point of view of that rather vague consideration of form which
is the only canon we have a right to impose upon Trollope. It is
impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he
regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is
only as an historian that he has the smallest _locus standi_. As a
narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt
a back-bone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real.
This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid
story-tellers; we need only mention (to select a single instance), the
magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought of
admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him, as Garrick or John
Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the
foot-lights. Therefore, when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds
us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked
in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic
mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva
an invention.
It is a part of this same ambiguity of mind as to what constitutes
evidence that Trollope should sometimes endow his people with such
fantastic names. Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment make, as we
have seen, an awkward appearance in a modern novel; and Mr. Neversay
Die, Mr. Stickatit, Mr. Rerechild and Mr. Fillgrave (the two last the
family physicians), are scarcely more felicitous. It would be better to
go back to Bunyan at once. There is a person mentioned in _The Warden_
under the name of Mr. Quiverful--a poor clergyman, with a dozen
children, who holds the living of Puddingdale. This name is a humorous
allusion to his overflowing nursery, and it matters little so long as he
is not brought to the front. But in _Barchester Towers_, which carries
on the history of Hiram’s Hospital, Mr. Quiverful becomes, as a
candidate for Mr. Harding’s vacant place, an important element, and the
reader is made proportionately unhappy by the primitive character of
this satiric note. A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen children (which is the
number attained in _Barchester Towers_) is too difficult to believe in.
We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children; but we
cannot manage the combination. It is probably not unfair to say that if
Trollope derived half his inspiration from life, he derived the other
half from Thackeray; his earlier novels, in especial, suggest an
honourable emulation of the author of _The Newcomes_. Thackeray’s names
were perfect; they always had a meaning, and (except in his absolutely
jocose productions, where they were still admirable) we can imagine,
even when they are most figurative, that they should have been borne by
real people. But in this, as in other respects, Trollope’s hand was
heavier than his master’s; though when he is content not to be too
comical his appellations are sometimes fortunate enough. Mrs. Proudie is
excellent, for Mrs. Proudie, and even the Duke of Omnium and Gatherum
Castle rather minister to illusion than destroy it. Indeed, the names of
houses and places, throughout Trollope, are full of colour.
I would speak in some detail of _Barchester Towers_ if this did not seem
to commit me to the prodigious task of appreciating each of Trollope’s
works in succession. Such an attempt as that is so far from being
possible that I must frankly confess to not having read everything that
proceeded from his pen. There came a moment in his vigorous career (it
was even a good many years ago) when I renounced the effort to “keep up”
with him. It ceased to seem obligatory to have read his last story; it
ceased soon to be very possible to know which was his last. Before that,
I had been punctual, devoted; and the memories of the earlier period are
delightful. It reached, if I remember correctly, to about the
publication of _He Knew He Was Right_; after which, to my recollection
(oddly enough, too, for that novel was good enough to encourage a
continuance of past favours, as the shopkeepers say), the picture
becomes dim and blurred. The author of _Orley Farm_ and _The Small House
at Allington_ ceased to produce individual works; his activity became a
huge “serial.” Here and there, in the vast fluidity, an organic particle
detached itself. _The Last Chronicle of Barset_, for instance, is one of
his most powerful things; it contains the sequel of the terrible history
of Mr. Crawley, the starving curate--an episode full of that literally
truthful pathos of which Trollope was so often a master, and which
occasionally raised him quite to the level of his two immediate
predecessors in the vivid treatment of English life--great artists whose
pathetic effects were sometimes too visibly prepared. For the most part,
however, he should be judged by the productions of the first half of
his career; later the strong wine was rather too copiously watered. His
practice, his acquired facility, were such that his hand went of itself,
as it were, and the thing looked superficially like a fresh inspiration.
But it was not fresh, it was rather stale; and though there was no
appearance of effort, there was a fatal dryness of texture. It was too
little of a new story and too much of an old one. Some of these ultimate
compositions--_Phineas Redux_ (_Phineas Finn_ is much better), _The
Prime Minister_, _John Caldigate_, _The American Senator_, _The Duke’s
Children_--betray the dull, impersonal rumble of the mill-wheel. What
stands Trollope always in good stead (in addition to the ripe habit of
writing), is his various knowledge of the English world--to say nothing
of his occasionally laying under contribution the American. His American
portraits, by the way (they are several in number), are always friendly;
they hit it off more happily than the attempt to depict American
character from the European point of view is accustomed to do: though,
indeed, as we ourselves have not yet learned to represent our types very
finely--are not apparently even very sure what our types are--it is
perhaps not to be wondered at that transatlantic talent should miss the
mark. The weakness of transatlantic talent in this particular is apt to
be want of knowledge; but Trollope’s knowledge has all the air of being
excellent, though not intimate. Had he indeed striven to learn the way
to the American heart? No less than twice, and possibly even oftener,
has he rewarded the merit of a scion of the British aristocracy with the
hand of an American girl. The American girl was destined sooner or later
to make her entrance into British fiction, and Trollope’s treatment of
this complicated being is full of good humour and of that fatherly
indulgence, that almost motherly sympathy, which characterises his
attitude throughout toward the youthful feminine. He has not mastered
all the springs of her delicate organism nor sounded all the mysteries
of her conversation. Indeed, as regards these latter phenomena, he has
observed a few of which he has been the sole observer. “I got to be
thinking if any one of them should ask me to marry him,” words
attributed to Miss Boncassen, in _The Duke’s Children_, have much more
the note of English American than of American English. But, on the
whole, in these matters Trollope does very well. His fund of
acquaintance with his own country--and indeed with the world at
large--was apparently inexhaustible, and it gives his novels a spacious,
geographical quality which we should not know where to look for
elsewhere in the same degree, and which is the sign of an extraordinary
difference between such an horizon as his and the limited world-outlook,
as the Germans would say, of the brilliant writers who practise the art
of realistic fiction on the other side of the Channel. Trollope was
familiar with all sorts and conditions of men, with the business of
life, with affairs, with the great world of sport, with every component
part of the ancient fabric of English society. He had travelled more
than once all over the globe, and for him, therefore, the background of
the human drama was a very extensive scene. He had none of the pedantry
of the cosmopolite; he remained a sturdy and sensible middle-class
Englishman. But his work is full of implied reference to the whole arena
of modern vagrancy. He was for many years concerned in the management of
the Post-Office; and we can imagine no experience more fitted to impress
a man with the diversity of human relations. It is possibly from this
source that he derived his fondness for transcribing the letters of his
love-lorn maidens and other embarrassed persons. No contemporary
story-teller deals so much in letters; the modern English epistle (very
happily imitated, for the most part), is his unfailing resource.