light has never to my thinking been accurately taken. The crew of
Odysseus were Greeks. They beached their ship (says Homer) on the isle
of the Laestrygonians: and there came down to them the Queen of the
Laestrygonians, “a woman as tall as a mountain,” _and they hated her_.
The Victorian Age lent itself to excess; and its excessive figures are
our statues for some to deface or bedaub. But I, who have purposely
compared Elizabeth Gaskell with her most ornate contemporary, dare
to prophesy that when criticism has sifted all out, she will come to
her own, as a woman of genius, sweetly proportioned as a statue, yet
breathing; one of these writers we call by that vain word--so vain, so
pathetic even when used of the greatest poet--“immortal.”
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS
I
A few months ago I asked a publisher if he had ever thought of
venturing on a complete edition of Trollope, and was answered that he
had thought of it often, but doubted it would not pay. A few weeks ago
I referred this answer to an eminent bookseller, and he praised the
publisher’s judgment. I retain my belief that the pair of them are
mistaken: for let the name of Trollope be mentioned in any company
of novel-lovers, almost to a certainty one or two will kindle, avow
a passion for him, and start a chorus of lament that there exists no
complete worthy edition of him.
“All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf”--and all Trollope’s would
occupy a plaguey long one. Some of them, too, are hasty, baddish
novels. None the less, I see that shelf as one of trusted and familiar
resort for such a number of my fellows as would fill a respectable
subscription-list: and, anyhow, it remains a scandal that certain good
works of his--_The Eustace Diamonds_, for instance--are unprocurable
save by advertising for second-hand copies. Mr. Humphrey Milford, of
the Oxford University Press, has recently printed _The Claverings_ and
_The Belton Estate_ in the World’s Classics, with the _Autobiography_,
which did, as it happened, about as much harm as a perfectly honest
book could do to an honest man’s fame. Messrs. Chatto & Windus--whom,
as Cicero would say, “I name for the sake of honour,” as publishers
who respect their moral contract to keep an author’s books alive while
they can--have kept on sale some eight or nine, including _The American
Senator_, _The Way We Live Now_, and _The Golden Lion of Grandpré_;
and the famous Barsetshire six, of which Messrs. George Bell now offer
us a cheap and pleasant reprint,[7] have always been (as they say in
Barset) “come-at-able” in some form or another. But while three full
editions of Stevenson have been subscribed for since his death in 1894
(the first of them fetching far more than the original price), and his
sale in cheaper editions has been high and constant, Trollope, who died
in 1882, has, in these forty-odd years, received no gratitude of public
recognition at all answerable to his deserts.
[7] Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels: (1) _The Warden_, (2)
_Barchester Towers_, (3) _Dr. Thorne_, (4) _Framley
Parsonage_, (5) _The Small House at Allington_ (2 vols.),
(6) _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ (2 vols.) 8 vols. 25s.
the set. (Bell & Sons.)
It is a curious business in two ways. For the first, the rebirth of
Trollope’s fame, with the growing readiness of an admirer to cast away
apology and hail a fellow-admirer as a friend “by adoption tried,” has
nothing esoteric about it. A passion for Peacock, or for Landor--as
a passion for Pindar--you may share with a friend as a half-masonic,
half-amorous secret. But there can be no such freemasonry over
Trollope, who is as English as a cut off the joint or a volume of
_Punch_. For the second curiosity, I suppose that no man ever wrote
himself down at a more delicately ill-chosen time than did Trollope
by the publication (posthumous) of his _Autobiography_ in 1883. It was
a brave--if unconsciously brave--and candid book. But it fell on a
generation of young men fired in literature by Flaubert, in painting
(say) by Whistler; on a generation just beginning to be flamboyant over
“art for art’s sake,” the _mot juste_, and the rest. It all seems vain
enough at this distance, and the bigots of each successive iron time
will always be arraigning their fathers’ harmless art, no doubt to the
ultimate advancement of letters. But by young men quite honestly and
frenetically devoted to chiselling out English as though (God rest
them!) in obedience to a Higher Power, it may be allowed that such a
confession as the following would be felt as an irritant:
All those, I think, who have lived as literary men--working daily
as literary labourers--will agree with me that three hours a day
will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should
so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously
during those three hours--or have so tutored his mind that it
shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing
at the wall before him till he shall have found the words with
which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my
custom--and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a
little lenient to myself--to write with my watch before me, and
to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have
found that my 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my
watch went.
The reader may easily imagine the maddening effect of that upon any
ambitious young writer, indolent by habit yet conscientious in his
craft, reminiscent of hours spent in gazing at a wall for words with
which he wanted to express his ideas. How many times did Plato alter
the opening sentence of _The Republic_? How many times did Gray recast
the _Elegy_?
But time, which should bring the philosophic mind, will lead most
critics who follow criticism sincerely to the happy conviction that
there are no rules for the operation of genius; a conviction born to
save a vast amount of explanation--and whitewash. Literary genius may
be devoted, as with Milton; nonchalant, as with Congreve; elaborately
draped, as with Tennyson. Catullus or Burns may splash your face and
run on; but always the unmistakable god has passed your way. In reading
Trollope one’s sense of trafficking with genius arises more and more
evidently out of his large sincerity--a sincerity in bulk, so to speak;
wherefore, to appraise him, you must read him in bulk, taking the good
with the bad, even as you must with Shakespeare. (This comparison is
not so foolish as it looks at first sight: since, while no two authors
can ever have been more differently gifted, it would be difficult to
name a third in competition as typically English.) The very mass of
Trollope commands a real respect; its prodigious quantity is felt to be
a quality, as one searches in it and finds that--good or bad, better
or very much worse--there is not a dishonest inch in the whole. He
practised among novelists of genius: Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, the
Brontës, George Eliot, Ouida were his contemporaries; he lived through
the era of “sensational novels,” _Lady Audley’s Secret_ and the rest;
and he wrote, as he confesses, with an eye on the publisher’s cheque.
But no success of genius tempted him to do more than admire it from
a distance; no success of “sensation” seduced him from his loom of
honest tweed. He criticises the gods and Titans of his time. He had
personal reasons for loving Thackeray, who gave him his great lift into
fame by commissioning him to write the serial novel that opened the
_Cornhill_ upon a highly expectant public. Trollope played up nobly to
the compliment and the responsibility. _Framley Parsonage_ belongs to
his very best: it took the public accurately (and deservedly) between
wind and water. Thackeray was grateful for the good and timely service;
Trollope for the good and timely opportunity. Yet one suspects no taint
of servility when he writes of Thackeray that “among all our novelists
his style is the purest, as to my ear it is the most harmonious.”
(And so, I hope, say most of us.) Of Dickens he declares with entire
simplicity that his “own peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter” forbids
him to join in the full chorus of applause. “Mrs. Gamp, Micawber,
Pecksniff, and others have become household words--but to my judgment
they are not human beings.”
Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is
jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of
rules--almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers
who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore
be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness of
his criticism when he acknowledges to himself--as he is compelled
in all honesty to do--that with the language, such as it is, the
writer has satisfied the great mass of the readers of his country.
To the merits of Disraeli--whom he must take into account as “the
present Prime Minister of England,” who “has been so popular as a
novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled to
speak of him”--he is quite genuinely blind. For the political insight
which burns in page after page of _Coningsby_, as for the seriousness
at the core of _Sybil_, he has no eyes at all. To him, dealing with
the honest surface and sub-surface of English country life, with the
rooted interest of county families and cathedral closes, all Disraeli’s
pictures of high society appear as pomatum and tinsel, false glitter
and flash. He had never a guess that this flash and glitter (false as
they so often were) played over depths his own comfortable philosophy
never divined. He just found it false and denounced it. Upon Wilkie
Collins and the art that constructed _The Woman in White_ and _The
Moonstone_ he could only comment that “as it is a branch which I have
not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural that his work should
be very much lost upon me individually. When I sit down to write a
novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to
end.”
Again, honest though he was, he accepted and used false tricks and
conventions calculated, in the ’eighties and ’nineties, to awake
frenzy in any young practitioner who, however incompetent, was trying
to learn how a novel should be written. The worst “stage aside” of
an old drama was as nothing in comparison with Trollope’s easy-going
remarks, dropped anywhere in the story, and anyhow, that “This is a
novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. I might just as easily make
my heroine do _this_ as do _that_. Which shall it be?... Well, I am
going to make her do _that_; for if she did _this_, what would become
of my novel?” One can imagine Henry James wincing physically at such a
question posed in cold print by an artist; as in a most catholic and
charitable paper--written in 1883, when the young dogs were assembling
to insult Trollope’s carcase--he reveals himself as wincing over the
first sentence in the last chapter of _Barchester Towers_: “The end of
a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of
sweetmeats and sugar plums.” James laments:
These little slaps at credulity ... 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 a historian and
his narrative as history. It is only as a historian that he has
the smallest _locus standi_. As a narrator of fictitious events
he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic he
must relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption
permeates, animates all the work of the most solid storytellers....
Yes; but on further acquaintance with Trollope one discovers that this
trick (annoying always) of asking, “Now what shall we make Mrs. Bold
do?--accept Mr. Arabin, or reject him?” is no worse than “uncle’s
fun,” as I may put it. Uncle is just playing with us, though we wish
he wouldn’t. In fact, Trollope never chooses the wrong answer to the
infelicitous question. He is wise and unerringly right every time. You
will (I think) search his novels in vain for a good man or a good woman
untrue to duty as weighed out between heart and conscience.
Another offence in Trollope is his distressing employment of facetious
names--“Mr. Quiverful” for a philoprogenitive clergyman, “Dr.
Fillgrave” for a family physician, etc. “It would be better,” murmurs
Henry James pathetically, “to go back to Bunyan at once.” (Trollope,
in fact, goes back farther--to the abominable tradition of Ben Jonson;
and it is the less excusable because he could invent perfect names when
he tried--Archdeacon Grantly, Johnny Eames, Algernon Crosbie, Mrs.
Proudie, the Dales of Allington, the Thornes of Ullathorne, Barchester,
Framley--names, families, places fitting like gloves.) And still worse
was he advised when he introduced caricature, for which he had small
gift, into his stories; “taking off” eminent bishops in the disguise
of objectionable small boys, or poking laborious fun at Dickens and
Carlyle under the titles of Mr. Sentiment and Dr. Pessimist Anticant.
_The Warden_ is in conception, and largely in execution, a beautiful
story of an old man’s conscience. It is a short story, too. I know of
none that could be more easily shortened to an absolute masterpiece by
a pair of scissors.
With Trollope, as with Byron, in these days a critic finds himself at
first insensibly forced, as though by shouldering of a crowd, upon
apology for the man’s reputation.
II
I do not wish to make a third with Pontius Pilate and Mr. Chadband in
raising the question, “What is Truth?” but merely to suggest here that,
as soon as ever you raise it over poetry or over prose fiction, it
becomes--as Aristotle did not miss to discover--highly philosophical
and ticklish. To begin at plumb bottom with your mere matter-of-fact
man, you will be asked to explain how in the world there can be “truth”
in “fiction,” the two being opponent and mutually exclusive terms; and
such a man will tell you that larkspurs don’t listen, lilies don’t
whisper, and no spray blossoms with pleasure because a bird has
clung to it; wherefore, what is the use of pretending any such lies?
Ascending a little higher in the scale of creation, we come to another
bottom, a false bottom, a Bully Bottom, who enjoys make-believe, but
feels it will never do “to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among
ladies.” Still ascending past much timber, we emerge on the decks of
argosies--
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
portlily negligent of all this bottom-business on which they ride,
carrying piled canvas over the foam of perilous seas. In short, the man
who hasn’t it in his soul that there is a truth of emotion and a truth
of imagination just as solid for a keelson as any truth of fact, merely
does not know what literature is _about_. As Heine once said of a fat
opponent, “it is easier for a camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than
for that fellow to pass through the eye of a needle.” Now Trollope,
if we look at him in one way, and consider him as an entirely honest
Bottom, simply saw Micawber as a grotesque creation and Victor Hugo as
a writer extravagantly untrue to nature. He merely could not understand
what Hugo would be aiming at (say) in _Gastibelza_ or in the divine
serenade:
Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!
Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.
Je serai grand et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons ...
Tu seras dame et moi comte.
Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.
He could as little see--and yet who doubts it?--that the creator of
Micawber was absolutely honest in closing _David Copperfield_ on
the declaration that “no one can ever believe this Narrative in the
reading more than I believed it in the writing.” What Trollope made
of _Don Quixote_ (or of _Alice in Wonderland_) lies beyond my power
to imagine. But the point for us is that as an honest man who lived
through the vogue of Poe and Dickens and, in later times, of Ouida (who
will surely, soon or late, be recognised for the genius she was), and
was all the time, on his own admission, alive as anyone to the market,
Trollope kept the noiseless tenor of his way and, resisting temptation
this side or that, went on describing life as he saw it.
Thus, and in this easy, humdrum, but pertinacious style, he arrived,
much as he often arrived at the death of a fox. He was a great
fox-hunter; lumbering in the saddle, heavy, short-sighted, always
unaware of what might happen on t’other side of the next fence--“few
have explored more closely than I have done the depth and breadth and
water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch.” He knew little of the
science of the sport:
Indeed, all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them.
My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of
a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full
conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I
have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy and have
never ridden expensive horses.
“The cause of my delight in the amusement,” he confesses, “I have
never been able to analyze my own satisfaction.” He arose regularly at
5:30 A.M., had his coffee brought him by a groom, had completed his
“literary work” before he dressed for breakfast; then on four working
days a week he toiled for the General Post Office, and on the other two
rode to hounds. In all kinds of spare time--in railway-carriages or
crossing to America--he had always a pen in his hand, a pad of paper on
his knee, or on a cabin table specially constructed.
As he sets it all down, with parenthetical advice to the literary
tyro, it is all as simple, apparently, as a cash account. But don’t
you believe it! The man who created the Barsetshire novels lived quite
as intimately with his theme as Dickens did in _David Copperfield_;
nay, more intimately. To begin with, his imaginary Barsetshire is
as definitely an actual piece of England as Mr. Hardy’s Wessex. Of
_Framley Parsonage_ he tells us that
as I wrote it I became more closely than ever acquainted with the
new shire which I had added to the English counties.... I had it
all in my mind--its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes,
its members of Parliament and the different hunts that rode over
it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and
their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth
novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I
wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories
there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not
represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as
though I had lived and wandered there.
Here Trollope asserts less than one-half of his true claim. He not only
carried all Barsetshire in his brain as a map, with every cross-road,
by-lane, and footpath noted--Trollope was great at cross-roads,
having as an official reorganised, simplified, and speeded-up the
postal service over a great part of rural England--but knew all the
country-houses, small or great, of that shire, with their families,
pedigrees, intermarriages, political interests, monetary anxieties,
the rise and fall of interdependent squires, parsons, tenants; how a
mortgage, for example, will influence a character, a bank-book set
going a matrimonial intrigue, a transferred bill operate on a man’s
sense of honour. You seem to see him moving about the Cathedral Close
in “very serviceable suit of black,” or passing the gates and lodge
of a grand house in old hunting-pink like a very wise solicitor on a
holiday: garrulous, to be sure, but to be trusted with any secret--to
be trusted most of all, perhaps, with that secret of a maiden’s love
which as yet she hardly dares to avow to herself. Here let us listen to
the late Frederic Harrison, who puts it exactly:
The Barsetshire cycle of tales has one remarkable feature; for it
is designed[8] on a scheme which is either a delightful success or
a tiresome failure. And it is a real success. To fill eight volumes
in six distinct tales with the intricate relations of one set of
families, all within access to one cathedral city, covering a whole
generation in time, and exhibiting the same characters from youth
to maturity and age--this is indeed a perilous task.... Balzac and
Zola abroad have done this, and with us Scott, Thackeray, Lytton,
and Dickens have in some degree tried this plan. But, I think,
no English novelist has worked it out on so large a field, with
such minute elaboration, and with such entire mastery of the many
dilemmas and pitfalls which beset the competitor in this long and
intricate course.
[8] I should prefer to say that it grew.--Q.
It is a strange reflection--as one turns the advertisement pages of
_The Times_, or of _Country Life_, and scans the photographs of
innumerable “stately homes” to-day on the market--that Trollope’s fame
should be reviving just as the society he depicted would seem to be in
process of deracination. I use the word “deracination” because that
society--with all its faults, stunted offshoots, gnarled prejudices,
mossed growth of convention, parasitic ivies--was a tree of ancestry
rooted in the countryside, not to be extracted save by wrenching of
fibres and with bleeding of infinite homely ties. To some extent, no
doubt, this sorrowful dislocation must follow all long wars. A hundred
years ago Cobbett rode our land and noted how its true gentry, as a
reward for their very sacrifices during the Napoleonic struggle, were
being dispossessed by bankers and “loan-mongers.” So, to-day, are
decent families--who, while “thinking too much of themselves,” thought
much for their neighbours--being uprooted and exiled, and taking into
lodgings a few portraits, some medals, and the last framed piece of
vellum conferring posthumously a D.S.O. _These_ times, at any rate,
do not “strike monied worldlings with dismay.” On the contrary, the
war-profiteer and the week-ender with his golf-clubs are smothering the
poor last of the society that Trollope knew; and in time, no doubt,
_their_ sons will go to Eton and Winchester, learn in holidays the old
English love of field and stream and sea, and so prepare themselves in
a generation or two to cast off life at earliest call simply because
this England, to which they have succeeded, has come to be, in _their_
turn, _their_ country. Thus it will go on again (please heaven) as the
father’s hair wears off the grandson’s hoof.
The fortunes and misfortunes of Trollope’s comfortable England have
always this element of the universal, that they are not brought about
by any devastating external calamity, but always by process of inward
rectitude or inward folly, reasonably operating on the ordinary
business of life. In this business he can win and keep our affection
for an entirely good man--for Mr. Harding, for Doctor Thorne. In all
his treatment of women, even of the _jeune fille_ of the Victorian
Age, this lumbering, myopic rider-to-hounds always (as they say) “has
hands”--and to “have hands” is a gift of God. He was, as Henry James
noted, “by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of coarseness,”
but it is forgotten on the instant he touches a woman’s pulse. Over
that, to interpret it, he never bends but delicately. No one challenges
his portraits of the maturer ladies. Mrs. Proudie is a masterpiece,
of course, heroically consistent to the moment of her death--nay,
living afterwards consistently in her husband’s qualified regrets (can
anything be truer than the tragedy told with complete restraint in
chapters 66 and 67 of _The Last Chronicle_?). Lady Lufton’s portrait,
while less majestic, seems to me equally flawless, equably flawless.
Trollope’s women can all show claws on occasion; can all summon “that
sort of ill-nature which is not uncommon when one woman speaks of
another”; and the most, even of his maidens, betray sooner or later
some glance of that _malice_ upon the priestly calling, or rather upon
its pretensions, which Trollope made them share with him:
“Ah! yes: but Lady Lufton is not a clergyman, Miss Robarts.”