THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.
During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to
attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain
eminent publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid
which were discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more
or less renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these
personages was a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, of middle height, with a
ruddy countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore
large, gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant,
and looked at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of
inspection. He seemed to be in a state of some excitement; he spoke
volubly and almost boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and
powerful, though pleasant to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke,
with a burly briskness, from one side to another, addressing himself
first to this auditor and then to that, his words bursting forth from
beneath his white moustache with such an impetus of hearty breath that
it seemed as if all opposing arguments must be blown quite away.
Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony walking-stick, with much
vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as it appeared, the pates
of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress, though the rest of the
company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he was an exceedingly
fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you would have taken
him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western, nourished with
beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and least refined
variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly, however, you would
have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general contour and aspect
were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were delicately cut;
his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face was
susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here
was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but
carrying within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible.
His organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and
high-wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault,
but he was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others'
opinion concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened
with self-esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but
overanxious to secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he
came in contact. There was some peculiarity in him--some element or
bias in his composition that made him different from other men; but, on
the other hand, there was an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile
this difference, and to prove himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the
same cut and quality as all the rest of the world. Hence he was in a
demonstrative, expository, or argumentative mood; he could not sit
quiet in the face of a divergence between himself and his associates;
he was incorrigibly strenuous to obliterate or harmonize the
irreconcilable points between him and others; and since these points
remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant state of storm and
stress on the subject.
It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I
believe that no man in London society was more generally liked than
Anthony Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above
indicated; and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His
artlessness was boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent
but somewhat belated good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who
not only have no reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them.
After he had shown you all he had in him, you would have seen nothing
that was not gentlemanly, honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered
man, and the ardor and hurry of his temperament made him seem more so
than he really was; but he was never more angry than he was forgiving
and generous. He was hurt by little things, and little things pleased
him; he was suspicious and perverse, but in a manner that rather
endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to a casual
acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was
something of a paradox--an entertaining contradiction. The publication
of his autobiography explained many things in his character that were
open to speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most
interesting and amusing that its author has ever written, but it places
its subject before the reader more completely and comprehensively than
most autobiographies do. This, however, is due much less to any direct
effort or intention on the writer's part, than to the unconscious
self-revelation which meets the reader on every page. No narrative
could be simpler, less artificial; and yet, everywhere, we read between
the lines, and, so to speak, discover Anthony Trollope in spite of his
efforts to discover himself to us.
The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous
fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His
boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could
well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his
father's part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile
manhood"--whatever that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened
away all his clients by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one
mischance after another until he landed himself and his family in open
bankruptcy; from which they were rescued, partly by death, which
carried away four of them (including the old gentleman), and partly by
Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of age, brought out her famous book
on America, and continued to make a fair income by literature (as she
called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-six years old, and having
produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she permitted herself to
retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth, cherished what her son
calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when her American
experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy aspects of
democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own country had
begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early way, "and
thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a valiant
and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known," says
her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy";
and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her
husband and four of her six children were dying upstairs of
consumption, and she had to divide her time between nursing them and
writing. Assuredly, no son of hers need apprehend the
reproach--"_Tydides melior matre_"; though Anthony, and his brother
Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her pretty hard. The former
remarks, with that terrible complacency in an awful fact which is one
of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that the three of them
"wrote more books than were probably ever before produced by a single
family." The existence of a few more such families could be consistent
only with a generous enlargement of the British Museum.
The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was
one of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than
twelve mortal years of schooling--from the time he was seven until he
was nineteen--and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember
that he ever knew a lesson. "I have been flogged," he says, "oftener
than any other human being." Nay, his troubles began before his
school-days; for his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks
to him while he was shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head
inclined in such a manner "that he could pull my hair without stopping
his razor or dropping his shaving-brush." This is a depressing picture;
and there are plenty more like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow,
meeting the poor little draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to
know, in awful accents, how so dirty a boy dared to show himself near
the school! "He must have known me, had he seen me as he was wont to
see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps,"
adds his victim, "he did not recognize me by my face!" But it is
comforting to learn, in another place, that justice overtook the
oppressor. "Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of Peterborough; but his
successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of Canterbury." There is a
great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of these two men, the
latter of whom "could not have said anything ill-natured if he had
tried."
Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with
harrowing persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster)
punished him on suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the
unfortunate youngster happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the
latter fact began to be obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that
perhaps he had been wrong. But, with a boy's stupid slowness, I said
nothing, and he had not the courage to carry reparation farther." The
poverty of Anthony's father deprived the boy of all the external
advantages that might have enabled him to take rank with his fellows:
and his native awkwardness and sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had
no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and
ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive
manner. Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all
through life. When I have been claimed as school-fellow by some of
those many hundreds who were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester,
I have felt that I had no right to talk of things from most of which I
was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but to make a stand
against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage which I did not
possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he was driven to
rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which my
opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the
characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this
combat, may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in
claiming this solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false
boast." The lonely, lugubrious little champion! One would almost have
been willing to have received from him a black eye and a bloody nose,
only to comfort his sad heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific
earnestness of that solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy
it was (if any) who lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his
face.
After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he
had an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he
might have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his
schooling made him acquainted with the French and German languages.
Being, however, entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study
them in order to his admission; and while he was thus employed, he
received news of a vacant clerkship in the General Post-Office, with
the dazzling salary of £90 a year. Needless to say that he jumped at
such an opening, seeing before him a vision of a splendid civil and
social career, at something over twenty pounds a quarter. But London,
even fifty years ago, was a more expensive place than Anthony imagined.
Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness of the city, with no one
to advise or guide him. The consequence was that these latter days of
his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In reviewing his
plight at this period, he observes: "I had passed my life where I had
seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no house in
which I could habitually see a lady's face or hear a lady's voice. At
the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I hated my
work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of money,
sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a
matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me
down to the lowest pits--a feeling that I had been looked upon as an
evil, an encumbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those
connected with me had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were
half-ashamed of me. I acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be
loved--a strong wish to be popular. No one had ever been less so."
Under these circumstances, he remarks that, although, no doubt, if the
mind be strong enough, the temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain
to admit that the temptation prevailed with him. He did not sit at
home, after his return from the office, in the evening, to drink tea
and read, but tramped out in the streets, and tried to see life and be
jolly on £90 a year. He borrowed four pounds of a money-lender, to
augment his resources, and found, after a few years, that he had paid
him two hundred pounds for the accommodation. He met with every variety
of absurd and disastrous adventure. The mother of a young woman with
whom he had had an innocent flirtation in the country appeared one day
at his desk in the office, and called out before all the clerks,
"Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?" On another
occasion a sum of money was missing from the table of the director.
Anthony was summoned. The director informed him of the loss--"and, by
G--!" he continued, thundering his fist down on the table, "no one has
been in the room but you and I." "Then, by G--!" cried Anthony,
thundering _his_ fist down upon something, "you have taken it!" This
was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to be,
not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink
flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director.
Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the
Half-Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.
So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now
we learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a
journal, which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance,
indiscretion, idleness, and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use
of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility." In
addition to this, and more to the purpose, he had formed an odd habit.
Living, as he was forced to do, so much to himself, if not by himself,
he had to play, not with other boys, but with himself; and his favorite
play was to conceive a tale, or series of fictitious events, and to
carry it on, day after day, for months together, in his mind. "Nothing
impossible was ever introduced, or violently improbable. I was my own
hero, but I never became a king or a duke, still less an Antinoüs, or
six feet high. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young
women used to be very fond of me. I learned in this way to live in a
world outside the world of my own material life." This is pointedly,
even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of his death, did
Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or violently
improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never dissolved
before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being; his
heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles
as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found
them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not
illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of
that other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is
more familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the
transcendental lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly
than Trollope defined to his own apprehension his own literary
capabilities and limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his
fortes and his foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is
seldom beguiled into toiling with futile ambition after effects that
are beyond him. His proper domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is
inimitably at home here; and when he invites us there to visit him, we
may be sure of getting good and wholesome entertainment. The writer's
familiarity with his characters communicates itself imperceptibly to
the reader; there are no difficult or awkward introductions; the toning
of the picture (to use the painter's phrase) is unexceptionable; and if
it be rather tinted than colored, the tints are handled in a
workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists seem to possess so
sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought of the British
aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of them from the
observer's point of view, but he has reasoned them out intellectually.
The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is applied to events
rather than to personages: we have the scene described for us but we do
not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters if we saw
them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from their
author's testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how they
would act under given circumstances. The logical sequence of events is
carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil,
other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more
unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good
deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind
as to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains
whatever complication comes up for settlement. But to range about
unhampered by any theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena,
and to report thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of
artistic propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to
Trollope, and derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.
Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his
novels interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store
for him,--or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no
curdling horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many
murders, forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in
Trollope's novels as in any others; but they are not told about in a
manner to alarm us; we accept them philosophically; there are
paragraphs in our morning paper that excite us more. And yet they are
narrated with art, and with dramatic effect. They are interesting, but
not uncourteously--not exasperatingly so; and the strangest part of it
is that the introductory and intermediate passages are no less
interesting, under Trollope's treatment, than are the murders and
forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of nature,--he
encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness and
severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of her.
His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to the
sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a
paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.
Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains.
His attitude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or
animosity, but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope
places upon him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and
says to us: "Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms
when pressure is applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You
observe that the squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if
you please, I will bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed,
madam; the reptile undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us
some good, and you may trust me not to let him do you any harm.
There!--Yes, evisceration by means of pressure is beyond question
painful; but every one must have observed the benevolence of my
forefinger during the operation; and I fancy even the subject of the
experiment (were he in a condition to express his sentiments) would
have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I shall have
the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly. John, another reptile,
please!" Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope's credit that he wrote
somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit of the English
people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for
these novels--and read them!
But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future.
After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant
surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get
on in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a
day. He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he
kept up the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his
death. "It will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have
ridden hard. I know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy,
and I am now old; but I ride with a boy's energy, hating the roads, and
despising young men who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me
anything better than when I have gone through a long run to the finish,
keeping a place, not of glory, but of credit, among my juniors."
Riding, working, having a jolly time, and gradually increasing his
income, he lived until 1842, when he became engaged; and he was married
on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that happy day," he declares, "as
the commencement of my better life." It was at about this date, also,
that he began and finished, not without delay and procrastination, his
first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he did not doubt his own
intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel: "What I did doubt
was my own industry, and the chances of a market." Never, surely, was
self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel, he sent it to his
mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never brought him
anything, except a perception that it was considered by his friends to
be "an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease." During the
ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in all
that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than
£55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from
£100 to £1000 each; and thereafter, £3000 or more was his regular price
for a story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the
post-office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of £4500, "of
which I spent two-thirds and put by one." We should be doing an
injustice to Mr. Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so
frankly; for, as he early informs us, "my first object in taking to
literature was to make an income on which I and those belonging to me
might live in comfort." Nor will he let us forget that novel-writing,
to him, was not so much an art, or even a profession, as a trade, in
which all that can be asked of a man is that he shall be honest and
punctual, turning out good average work, and the more the better. "The
great secret consists in"--in what?--why, "in acknowledging myself to
be bound to rules of labor similar to those which an artisan or
mechanic is forced to obey." There may be, however, other incidental
considerations. "I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of
sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and agreeable
to my audience"; and he tells us that he has used some of his novels
for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again--"The
novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both
realistic and sensational in the highest degree." He says that he sees
no reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the
same time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two
hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his
working hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down
to write a novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And
finally, one is a little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically,
that a writer should not have to tell a story, but should have a story
to tell. Beyond a doubt, Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.
The world has long ago passed its judgment on his stories, but it is
interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though
never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. "A novel
should be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by
pathos. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius," he says;
but again, with strange imperviousness, "A small daily task, if it be
daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules." Beat them, how?
Why, in quantity. But how about quality? Is the travail of a work of
art the same thing as the making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us
that--
"Ever the words of the gods resound,
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom, in this low life's round,
Are unsealed, that he may hear."
No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the
cobbler's hammer at any time.
To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope
may have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to
English fictitious literature by his novels; and it need only be added,
in this connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem
best to be explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and
commonplaceness which we began by remarking in him. The separateness
has given him the standpoint whence he has been able to observe and
describe the commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness)
he is in vital sympathy.
But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for
Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died,
and he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in
London after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. "Up to that time I
had lived very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the
'Garrick.' I think I became popular among those with whom I associated.
I have ever wished to be liked by those around me--a wish that during
the first half of my life was never gratified." And, again, in summing
up his life, he says: "I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me
no sorrow. It has been the companionship, rather than the habit of
smoking that I loved. I have never desired to win money, and I have
lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its
vices and ill-effects--to have the sweet, and to leave the bitter
untasted--that has been my study. I will not say that I have never
scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly wounds."
A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as
this--who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this--such
a man, whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of
Fiction, is a credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be
numbered among the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called
his friend; and what his idea of friendship was, may be learned from
the passage in which he speaks of his friend Millais--with the
quotation of which this paper may fitly be concluded:--
"To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a
sweet sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised
without joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against
him without opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see
them, will come to him from the grave, and will tell him of my
regard--as one living man never tells another."