tone of allusion to many lands and many things, and whatever it brings
us of easier respiration, with that narrow vision of humanity which
accompanies the strenuous, serious work lately offered us in such
abundance by the votaries of art for art who sit so long at their desks
in Parisian _quatrièmes_. The contrast is complete, and it would be
interesting, had we space to do so here, to see how far it goes. On one
side a wide, good-humoured, superficial glance at a good many things; on
the other a gimlet-like consideration of a few. Trollope’s plan, as well
as Zola’s, was to describe the life that lay near him; but the two
writers differ immensely as to what constitutes life and what
constitutes nearness. For Trollope the emotions of a nursery-governess
in Australia would take precedence of the adventures of a depraved
_femme du monde_ in Paris or London. They both undertake to do the same
thing--to depict French and English manners; but the English writer
(with his unsurpassed industry) is so occasional, so accidental, so full
of the echoes of voices that are not the voice of the muse. Gustave
Flaubert, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, on the other hand, are nothing if
not concentrated and sedentary. Trollope’s realism is as instinctive, as
inveterate as theirs; but nothing could mark more the difference between
the French and English mind than the difference in the application, on
one side and the other, of this system. We say system, though on
Trollope’s part it is none. He has no visible, certainly no explicit
care for the literary part of the business; he writes easily,
comfortably, and profusely, but his style has nothing in common either
with the minute stippling of Daudet or the studied rhythms of Flaubert.
He accepted all the common restrictions, and found that even within the
barriers there was plenty of material. He attaches a preface to one of
his novels--_The Vicar of Bullhampton_, before mentioned--for the
express purpose of explaining why he has introduced a young woman who
may, in truth, as he says, be called a “castaway”; and in relation to
this episode he remarks that it is the object of the novelist’s art to
entertain the young people of both sexes. Writers of the French school
would, of course, protest indignantly against such a formula as this,
which is the only one of the kind that I remember to have encountered in
Trollope’s pages. It is meagre, assuredly; but Trollope’s practice was
really much larger than so poor a theory. And indeed any theory was good
which enabled him to produce the works which he put forth between 1856
and 1869, or later. In spite of his want of doctrinal richness I think
he tells us, on the whole, more about life than the “naturalists” in our
sister republic. I say this with a full consciousness of the
opportunities an artist loses in leaving so many corners unvisited, so
many topics untouched, simply because I think his perception of
character was naturally more just and liberal than that of the
naturalists. This has been from the beginning the good fortune of our
English providers of fiction, as compared with the French. They are
inferior in audacity, in neatness, in acuteness, in intellectual
vivacity, in the arrangement of material, in the art of characterising
visible things. But they have been more at home in the moral world; as
people say to-day they know their way about the conscience. This is the
value of much of the work done by the feminine wing of the school--work
which presents itself to French taste as deplorably thin and insipid.
Much of it is exquisitely human, and that after all is a merit. As
regards Trollope, one may perhaps characterise him best, in opposition
to what I have ventured to call the sedentary school, by saying that he
was a novelist who hunted the fox. Hunting was for years his most valued
recreation, and I remember that when I made in his company the voyage of
which I have spoken, he had timed his return from the Antipodes exactly
so as to be able to avail himself of the first day on which it should be
possible to ride to hounds. He “worked” the hunting-field largely; it
constantly reappears in his novels; it was excellent material.
But it would be hard to say (within the circle in which he revolved)
what material he neglected. I have allowed myself to be detained so long
by general considerations that I have almost forfeited the opportunity
to give examples. I have spoken of _The Warden_ not only because it made
his reputation, but because, taken in conjunction with _Barchester
Towers_, it is thought by many people to be his highest flight.
_Barchester Towers_ is admirable; it has an almost Thackerayan richness.
Archdeacon Grantley grows more and more into life, and Mr. Harding is as
charming as ever. Mrs. Proudie is ushered into a world in which she was
to make so great an impression. Mrs. Proudie has become classical; of
all Trollope’s characters she is the most often referred to. She is
exceedingly true; but I do not think she is quite so good as her fame,
and as several figures from the same hand that have not won so much
honour. She is rather too violent, too vixenish, too sour. The truly
awful female bully--the completely fatal episcopal spouse--would have, I
think, a more insidious form, a greater amount of superficial padding.
The Stanhope family, in _Barchester Towers_, are a real _trouvaille_,
and the idea of transporting the Signora Vesey-Neroni into a
cathedral-town was an inspiration. There could not be a better example
of Trollope’s manner of attaching himself to character than the whole
picture of Bertie Stanhope. Bertie is a delightful creation; and the
scene in which, at the party given by Mrs. Proudie, he puts this
majestic woman to rout is one of the most amusing in all the chronicles
of Barset. It is perhaps permitted to wish, by the way, that this
triumph had been effected by means intellectual rather than physical;
though, indeed, if Bertie had not despoiled her of her drapery we should
have lost the lady’s admirable “Unhand it, sir!” Mr. Arabin is charming,
and the henpecked bishop has painful truth; but Mr. Slope, I think, is a
little too arrant a scamp. He is rather too much the old game; he goes
too coarsely to work, and his clamminess and cant are somewhat overdone.
He is an interesting illustration, however, of the author’s dislike (at
that period at least) of the bareness of evangelical piety. In one
respect _Barchester Towers_ is (to the best of our recollection) unique,
being the only one of Trollope’s novels in which the interest does not
centre more or less upon a simple maiden in her flower. The novel
offers us nothing in the way of a girl; though we know that this
attractive object was to lose nothing by waiting. Eleanor Bold is a
charming and natural person, but Eleanor Bold is not in her flower.
After this, however, Trollope settled down steadily to the English girl;
he took possession of her, and turned her inside out. He never made her
a subject of heartless satire, as cynical fabulists of other lands have
been known to make the shining daughters of those climes; he bestowed
upon her the most serious, the most patient, the most tender, the most
copious consideration. He is evidently always more or less in love with
her, and it is a wonder how under these circumstances he should make her
so objective, plant her so well on her feet. But, as I have said, if he
was a lover, he was a paternal lover; as competent as a father who has
had fifty daughters. He has presented the British maiden under
innumerable names, in every station and in every emergency in life, and
with every combination of moral and physical qualities. She is always
definite and natural. She plays her part most properly. She has always
health in her cheek and gratitude in her eye. She has not a touch of the
morbid, and is delightfully tender, modest and fresh. Trollope’s
heroines have a strong family likeness, but it is a wonder how finely he
discriminates between them. One feels, as one reads him, like a man with
“sets” of female cousins. Such a person is inclined at first to lump
each group together; but presently he finds that even in the groups
there are subtle differences. Trollope’s girls, for that matter, would
make delightful cousins. He has scarcely drawn, that we can remember, a
disagreeable damsel. Lady Alexandrina de Courcy is disagreeable, and so
is Amelia Roper, and so are various provincial (and indeed metropolitan)
spinsters, who set their caps at young clergymen and government clerks.
Griselda Grantley was a stick; and considering that she was intended to
be attractive, Alice Vavasor does not commend herself particularly to
our affections. But the young women I have mentioned had ceased to
belong to the blooming season; they had entered the bristling, or else
the limp, period. Not that Trollope’s more mature spinsters invariably
fall into these extremes. Miss Thorne of Ullathorne, Miss Dunstable,
Miss Mackenzie, Rachel Ray (if she may be called mature), Miss Baker and
Miss Todd, in _The Bertrams_, Lady Julia Guest, who comforts poor John
Eames: these and many other amiable figures rise up to contradict the
idea. A gentleman who had sojourned in many lands was once asked by a
lady (neither of these persons was English), in what country he had
found the women most to his taste. “Well, in England,” he replied. “In
England?” the lady repeated. “Oh yes,” said her interlocutor; “they are
so affectionate!” The remark was fatuous, but it has the merit of
describing Trollope’s heroines. They are so affectionate. Mary Thorne,
Lucy Robarts, Adela Gauntlet, Lily Dale, Nora Rowley, Grace Crawley,
have a kind of clinging tenderness, a passive sweetness, which is quite
in the old English tradition. Trollope’s genius is not the genius of
Shakespeare, but his heroines have something of the fragrance of Imogen
and Desdemona. There are two little stories to which, I believe, his
name has never been affixed, but which he is known to have written, that
contain an extraordinarily touching representation of the passion of
love in its most sensitive form. In _Linda Tressel_ and _Nina Balatka_
the vehicle is plodding prose, but the effect is none the less poignant.
And in regard to this I may say that in a hundred places in Trollope the
extremity of pathos is reached by the homeliest means. He often achieved
a conspicuous intensity of the tragical. The long, slow process of the
conjugal wreck of Louis Trevelyan and his wife (in _He Knew He Was
Right_), with that rather lumbering movement which is often
characteristic of Trollope, arrives at last at an impressive
completeness of misery. It is the history of an accidental rupture
between two stiff-necked and ungracious people--“the little rift within
the lute”--which widens at last into a gulf of anguish. Touch is added
to touch, one small, stupid, fatal aggravation to another; and as we
gaze into the widening breach we wonder at the vulgar materials of which
tragedy sometimes composes itself. I have always remembered the chapter
called “Casalunga,” toward the close of _He Knew He Was Right_, as a
powerful picture of the insanity of stiff-neckedness. Louis Trevelyan,
separated from his wife, alone, haggard, suspicious, unshaven,
undressed, living in a desolate villa on a hill-top near Siena and
returning doggedly to his fancied wrong, which he has nursed until it
becomes an hallucination, is a picture worthy of Balzac. Here and in
several other places Trollope has dared to be thoroughly logical; he has
not sacrificed to conventional optimism; he has not been afraid of a
misery which should be too much like life. He has had the same courage
in the history of the wretched Mr. Crawley and in that of the
much-to-be-pitied Lady Mason. In this latter episode he found an
admirable subject. A quiet, charming, tender-souled English gentlewoman
who (as I remember the story of _Orley Farm_) forges a codicil to a will
in order to benefit her son, a young prig who doesn’t appreciate immoral
heroism, and who is suspected, accused, tried, and saved from conviction
only by some turn of fortune that I forget; who is furthermore an object
of high-bred, respectful, old-fashioned gallantry on the part of a
neighbouring baronet, so that she sees herself dishonoured in his eyes
as well as condemned in those of her boy: such a personage and such a
situation would be sure to yield, under Trollope’s handling, the last
drop of their reality.
There are many more things to say about him than I am able to add to
these very general observations, the limit of which I have already
passed. It would be natural, for instance, for a critic who affirms that
his principal merit is the portrayal of individual character, to
enumerate several of the figures that he has produced. I have not done
this, and I must ask the reader who is not acquainted with Trollope to
take my assertion on trust; the reader who knows him will easily make a
list for himself. No account of him is complete in which allusion is not
made to his practice of carrying certain actors from one story to
another--a practice which he may be said to have inherited from
Thackeray, as Thackeray may be said to have borrowed it from Balzac. It
is a great mistake, however, to speak of it as an artifice which would
not naturally occur to a writer proposing to himself to make a general
portrait of a society. He has to construct that society, and it adds to
the illusion in any given case that certain other cases correspond with
it. Trollope constructed a great many things--a clergy, an aristocracy,
a middle-class, an administrative class, a little replica of the
political world. His political novels are distinctly dull, and I confess
I have not been able to read them. He evidently took a good deal of
pains with his aristocracy; it makes its first appearance, if I remember
right, in _Doctor Thorne_, in the person of the Lady Arabella de Courcy.
It is difficult for us in America to measure the success of that
picture, which is probably, however, not absolutely to the life. There
is in _Doctor Thorne_ and some other works a certain crudity of
reference to distinctions of rank--as if people’s consciousness of this
matter were, on either side, rather inflated. It suggests a general
state of tension. It is true that, if Trollope’s consciousness had been
more flaccid he would perhaps not have given us Lady Lufton and Lady
Glencora Palliser. Both of these noble persons are as living as
possible, though I see Lady Lufton, with her terror of Lucy Robarts, the
best. There is a touch of poetry in the figure of Lady Glencora, but I
think there is a weak spot in her history. The actual woman would have
made a fool of herself to the end with Burgo Fitzgerald; she would not
have discovered the merits of Plantagenet Palliser--or if she had, she
would not have cared about them. It is an illustration of the
business-like way in which Trollope laid out his work that he always
provided a sort of underplot to alternate with his main story--a strain
of narrative of which the scene is usually laid in a humbler walk of
life. It is to his underplot that he generally relegates his vulgar
people, his disagreeable young women; and I have often admired the
perseverance with which he recounts these less edifying items. Now and
then, it may be said, as in _Ralph the Heir_, the story appears to be
all underplot and all vulgar people. These, however, are details. As I
have already intimated, it is difficult to specify in Trollope’s work,
on account of the immense quantity of it; and there is sadness in the
thought that this enormous mass does not present itself in a very
portable form to posterity.
Trollope did not write for posterity; he wrote for the day, the moment;
but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its
pocket. So much of the life of his time is reflected in his novels that
we must believe a part of the record will be saved; and the best parts
of them are so sound and true and genial, that readers with an eye to
that sort of entertainment will always be sure, in a certain proportion,
to turn to them. Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy,
though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the
heart of man to know itself. The heart of man does not always desire
this knowledge; it prefers sometimes to look at history in another
way--to look at the manifestations without troubling about the motives.
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative
literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for
emotions of recognition. It is the latter that Trollope gratifies, and
he gratifies it the more that the medium of his own mind, through which
we see what he shows us, gives a confident direction to our sympathy.
His natural rightness and purity are so real that the good things he
projects must be real. A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of
the sort of imagination--of imaginative feeling--that had fallen to the
share of Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our English race is
not poor.
1883.
V
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I
If there be a writer of our language at the present moment who has the
effect of making us regret the extinction of the pleasant fashion of the
literary portrait, it is certainly the bright particular genius whose
name I have written at the head of these remarks. Mr. Stevenson fairly
challenges portraiture, as we pass him on the highway of literature (if
that be the road, rather than some wandering, sun-chequered by-lane,
that he may be said to follow), just as the possible model, in local
attire, challenges the painter who wanders through the streets of a
foreign town looking for subjects. He gives us new ground to wonder why
the effort to fix a face and figure, to seize a literary character and
transfer it to the canvas of the critic, should have fallen into such
discredit among us, and have given way, to the mere multiplication of
little private judgment-seats, where the scales and the judicial wig,
both of them considerable awry, and not rendered more august by the
company of a vicious-looking switch, have taken the place, as the
symbols of office, of the kindly, disinterested palette and brush. It
has become the fashion to be effective at the expense of the sitter, to
make some little point, or inflict some little dig, with a heated party
air, rather than to catch a talent in the fact, follow its line, and put
a finger on its essence: so that the exquisite art of criticism,
smothered in grossness, finds itself turned into a question of “sides.”
The critic industriously keeps his score, but it is seldom to be hoped
that the author, criminal though he may be, will be apprehended by
justice through the handbills given out in the case; for it is of the
essence of a happy description that it shall have been preceded by a
happy observation and a free curiosity; and desuetude, as we may say,
has overtaken these amiable, uninvidious faculties, which have not the
glory of organs and chairs.
We hasten to add that it is not the purpose of these few pages to
restore their lustre or to bring back the more penetrating vision of
which we lament the disappearance. No individual can bring it back, for
the light that we look at things by is, after all, made by all of us. It
is sufficient to note, in passing, that if Mr. Stevenson had presented
himself in an age, or in a country, of portraiture, the painters would
certainly each have had a turn at him. The easels and benches would have
bristled, the circle would have been close, and quick, from the canvas
to the sitter, the rising and falling of heads. It has happened to all
of us to have gone into a studio, a studio of pupils, and seen the thick
cluster of bent backs and the conscious model in the midst. It has
happened to us to be struck, or not to be struck, with the beauty or the
symmetry of this personage, and to have made some remark which, whether
expressing admiration or disappointment, has elicited from one of the
attentive workers the exclamation, “Character, character is what he
has!” These words may be applied to Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson; in the
language of that art which depends most on direct observation,
character, character is what he has. He is essentially a model, in the
sense of a sitter; I do not mean, of course, in the sense of a pattern
or a guiding light. And if the figures who have a life in literature may
also be divided into two great classes, we may add that he is
conspicuously one of the draped: he would never, if I may be allowed the
expression, pose for the nude. There are writers who present themselves
before the critic with just the amount of drapery that is necessary for
decency; but Mr. Stevenson is not one of these--he makes his appearance
in an amplitude of costume. His costume is part of the character of
which I just now spoke; it never occurs to us to ask how he would look
without it. Before all things he is a writer with a style--a model with
a complexity of curious and picturesque garments. It is by the cut and
the colour of this rich and becoming frippery--I use the term
endearingly, as a painter might--that he arrests the eye and solicits
the brush.
That is, frankly, half the charm he has for us, that he wears a dress
and wears it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of
the supererogatory sword; or in other words that he is curious of
expression and regards the literary form not simply as a code of
signals, but as the key-board of a piano, and as so much plastic
material. He has that voice deplored, if we mistake not, by Mr. Herbert
Spencer, a manner--a manner for manner’s sake it may sometimes doubtless
be said. He is as different as possible from the sort of writer who
regards words as numbers, and a page as the mere addition of them; much
more, to carry out our image, the dictionary stands for him as a
wardrobe, and a proposition as a button for his coat. Mr. William
Archer, in an article[2] so gracefully and ingeniously turned that the
writer may almost be accused of imitating even while he deprecates,
speaks of him as a votary of “lightness of touch,” at any cost, and
remarks that “he is not only philosophically content but deliberately
resolved, that his readers shall look first to his manner, and only in
the second place to his matter.” I shall not attempt to gainsay this; I
cite it rather, for the present, because it carries out our own sense.
Mr. Stevenson delights in a style, and his own has nothing accidental or
diffident; it is eminently conscious of its responsibilities, and meets
them with a kind of gallantry--as if language were a pretty woman, and a
person who proposes to handle it had of necessity to be something of a
Don Juan. This bravery of gesture is a noticeable part of his nature,
and it is rather odd that at the same time a striking feature of that
nature should be an absence of care for things feminine. His books are
for the most part books without women, and it is not women who fall most
in love with them. But Mr. Stevenson does not need, as we may say, a
petticoat to inflame him: a happy collocation of words will serve the
purpose, or a singular image, or the bright eye of a passing conceit,
and he will carry off a pretty paradox without so much as a scuffle. The
tone of letters is in him--the tone of letters as distinct from that of
philosophy, or of those industries whose uses are supposed to be
immediate. Many readers, no doubt, consider that he carries it too far;
they manifest an impatience for some glimpse of his moral message. They
may be heard to ask what it is he proposes to demonstrate, with such a
variety of paces and graces.