Charles Dickens and other Victorians

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.

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:

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.”

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:

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:

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:

“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

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:

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:

Difference of time and convention and pruderies allowed for, Trollope will give you in a page or so of discourse between two Victorian maidens—the whole of it delicately understood, chivalrously handled, tenderly yet firmly revealed—the secret as no novelist has quite revealed it before or since. At any moment one may be surprised by a sudden Jane Austen touch; and this will come with the more startling surprise being dropped by a plain, presumably blunt, man. For Trollope adds to his strain of coarseness, already mentioned, a strain—or at least an intimate understanding—of cheapness. His gentle breeding and his upbringing (poverty-stricken though it had been) ever checked him on the threshold of the holies. But he had tholed too many years in the G.P.O. to have missed intimate acquaintance with

Those who understand this will understand why he could not bring himself to mate his “dear Lily Dale” with that faithful, most helpful, little bounder Johnny Eames. He knew his Johnny Eames too well to introduce him upon the Cathedral Close of Barchester, though he could successfully dare to introduce the Stanhope family. He walks among rogues, too, and wastrels, with a Mr. Sowerby or a Bertie Stanhope, as sympathetically as among bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons. His picture of Sowerby and the ruin he has brought on an ancient family, all through his own sins is no less and no more truthful than his picture of Mrs. Proudie in altercation with Mr. Slope; while they both are inferior in imaginative power to the scene of Mr. Crawley’s call on the Bishop. In the invention of Crawley, in his perfect handling of that strong and insane mind, I protest that I am astonished almost as though he had suddenly shown himself capable of inventing a King Lear. In this Trollope, with whom one has been jogging along under a slowly growing conviction that he is by miles a greater artist than he knows or has ever been reckoned, there explodes this character—and out of the kindliest intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in a fright and to a sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s originality or taken the great measure of his power.