Kingsley was always profoundly influenced by Frederick D. Maurice, who was a kind of spiritual Carlyle, without the genius or the learning of the mighty _Sartor_, with a fine gift of sympathy instead of sarcasm, with a genuine neo-Christian devoutness in lieu of an old-Hebrew Goetheism. Kingsley had some of Carlyle"s pa.s.sion, of his eloquence, of his power to strike fire out of stones. And so, just because _Yeast_ was so disjointed as a composition, so desultory in thought, so splendidly defiant of all the conventions of literature and all the ten commandments of British society in 1849, I am inclined to rank it as Kingsley"s typical performance in prose. It is more a work of art than _Alton Locke_, for it is much shorter, less akin to journalism, less spasmodic, and more full of poetry. _Yeast_ deals with the country--which Kingsley knew better and loved more than he did the town. It deals with real, permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson. Kingsley there speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul of a poet. The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village revel, are exquisite pieces of painting. And the difficulties overcome in the book are extreme. To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural romance in the style of _Silas Marner_, heightened with extracts from University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political diatribes in the vein of Cobbett"s appeals to the People--this was to show wonderful literary versatility and animation. And, after forty-five years, _Yeast_ can be read and re-read still!
_Alton Locke_ was no doubt more popular, more pa.s.sionately in earnest, more definite and intelligible than _Yeast_; and if I fail to hold it quite as the equal of _Yeast_ in literary merit, it is because these very qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art. It was written, we well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher. It is undoubtedly spasmodic, crude, and disorderly. A generation which has grown fastidious on the consummate finish of _Esmond_, _Romola_, and _Treasure Island_, is a little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our fathers in the forties, after the manner of _Sybil_, the _Last of the Barons_, or _Barnaby Rudge_. The Tennysonian modulation of phrase had not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us now.
As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so _Alton Locke_ was inspired by Carlyle"s _French Revolution_. The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica. Kingsley himself tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap. ix.), "I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, _the single epic of modern days_, Thomas Carlyle"s _French Revolution_."
Kingsley"s three masters were--in poetry, Tennyson; in social philosophy, Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice. He had far more of genius than had Maurice; he was a much more pa.s.sionate reformer than Tennyson; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle. Not that he imitated any of the three. _Yeast_ is not at all copied from Sartor, either in form or in thought; nor is _Alton Locke_ in any sense imitated from the _French Revolution_. It is inspired by it; but _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_ are entirely original, and were native outbursts from Kingsley"s own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy.
And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the thought of the young of the last generation. In the early fifties we were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composition as we have now become. Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities did not shock us so much, if we found them to come from a really glowing imagination and from genuine inspiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and ill-ordered. Now Kingsley "let himself go," in the way of Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, and d.i.c.kens, who not seldom poured out their conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form. It is possible that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from caring for _Alton Locke_. But I can a.s.sure them that five-and-forty years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of many. And the effect was permanent and creative. We may see to-day in England widespread results of that potent social movement which was called Christian Socialism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which the movement itself sadly lacked.
I was not of an age to take part in that movement, but in after years at the Working Men"s College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time.
Nowadays, when leading statesmen a.s.sure us "we are all Socialists now,"
when the demands of the old "Chartists" are Liberal common form, when trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely supported by politicians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which a.s.sailed the small band of reformers who, five-and-forty years ago, spoke up for these reforms. Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary, academic, and ecclesiastical cla.s.s, Charles Kingsley was the most outspoken, the most eloquent, and a.s.suredly the most effective. I do not say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most staunch; nor need we here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist reform. When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and developed, when we read again _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_, and note how much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends.
I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley"s earliest books, because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works.
As he grew in years, he did not develop. He improved for a time in literary form, but his excitable nerve-system, his impulsive imagination, drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated hither and thither without sure guide. From the time of his official success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced nothing worthy of himself, and much that was manifest book-making--the mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller. Of his historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all. His shallow Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was torn to pieces in the _Westminster Review_ (vol. xix. p. 305, April 1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History. Much less need we speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so shamefully worsted. For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons, tales, travels, poems, dialogues, children"s books, and historical, philosophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays--but the Charles Kingsley of _Yeast_, of _Alton Locke_, of _Hypatia_, of _Westward Ho!_ of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again. He burnt out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of restless enterprises, and a vehement outpouring of miscellaneous eloquence.
Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist.
The two elements did not blend altogether well. His poetic pa.s.sion carried away his reason and often confused his logic. His argumentative vehemence too often marred his fine imagination. Thus his _Saint"s Tragedy_ is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in _Yeast_ is mainly a radical pamphlet. Hardly one of his books is without a controversial preface, controversial t.i.tles, chapters, or pa.s.sages on questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society. Indeed, excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children"s books (but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind.
Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his weakness. Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English Church, a Christian minister. He was, indeed, a liberal priest, sometimes even too free and easy. He brings in the sacred name perhaps more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout way. He seemed at last to use the word "G.o.d" as if it were an expletive or mere intensive like a Greek _ge_ [gamma epsilon], meaning "very much"
or "very good," as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind "the wind of G.o.d." And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture and physical voluptuousness (_Hypatia_, _The Saint"s Tragedy_, _Saint Maura_, _Westward Ho!_), though it is true that his real nature is both eminently manly and pure.
As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in _Hypatia_ (chap. xxi.), who "was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and pa.s.sionately"--"He lived . . . in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one"--and so on. Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the "squire-bishop." But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.
[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as "and," "is," "are," "the," "who," "his," "its," "have," "been"--words without which few English sentences can be constructed--do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl.
IX
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run--that Anthony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pa.s.s that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the s.p.a.ce he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers.
I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with him at George Eliot"s, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the exception of Charlotte Bronte) I have often seen and heard speak in public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photographic alb.u.m of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in his posthumous _Autobiography_, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.
Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book--one of the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for--it is his business to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more modest _bonhomie_, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim to be a hero; he has no rare qualities--or none but industry and courage--and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work--you may think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas--but that is a true picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a brave soul, a genial companion.
With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, "I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour."
George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought--she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her ma.n.u.script two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together,"
she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope, "with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it"s a sheer matter of industry. It"s not the head that does it--it"s the cobbler"s wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!" In his _Autobiography_ he has elaborately explained this process--how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amus.e.m.e.nts, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quant.i.ty hour by hour. He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. _Dr. Thorne_ was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing _Dr.
Thorne_ he began _The Bertrams_. It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one can suppose that work of a very high cla.s.s can be so produced at all.
Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high cla.s.s. He says it is honest work, the best he could do.
He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quant.i.ty and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. "It"s dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr.
Crawley, in _The Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et_; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him--this is to tell us palpable nonsense.
Trollope"s sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even d.i.c.kens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to a.s.sert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.
One of Trollope"s strong points and one source of his popularity was a command over plain English almost perfect for his own limited purpose.
It is limpid, flexible, and melodious. It never rises into eloquence, poetry, or power; but it is always easy, clear, simple, and vigorous.
Trollope was not capable of the sustained mastery over style that we find in _Esmond_, nor had he the wit, pa.s.sion, and pathos at Thackeray"s command. But of all contemporaries he comes nearest to Thackeray in easy conversations and in quiet narration of incidents and motives. Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope is vulgar--for good old Anthony had a coa.r.s.e vein: it was in the family:--but as a rule his language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone.
This was one good result of his enormous rapidity of execution. His books read from cover to cover, as if they were spoken in one sitting by an _improvisatore_ in one and the same mood, who never hesitated an instant for a word, and who never failed to seize the word he wanted.
This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice and industry both in office work and in literary work. It is a mastery which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in the world. How few out of many millions have studied that subtle mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of these fluent and pellucid words.
His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently noticed. It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect harmony of tone. From the first line to the last, there is never a sentence or a pa.s.sage which strikes a discordant note; we are never worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by fine writing that fails to "come off." Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic. This can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of Jane Austen, for even Thackeray himself is now and then artificial in _Esmond_, and the vulgarity of _Yellowplush_ at last becomes fatiguing.
Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest qualities of style; absence of any pa.s.sion, poetry, mystery, or subtlety. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of Trollope"s tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.
In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal. His characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such persons utter in actual life. The characters, it is true, are the average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below the ordinary incidents of modern life. But within this very limited range of incident, and for this very common average of person and character, the conversations are photographic or stenographic reproductions of actual speech. His letters, especially his young ladies" letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic.
We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied witticisms of the older school. Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real speech than the allocutions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like natural talk. That has long been discarded. Jane Austen and Thackeray make their men and women discourse as men and women do. But perhaps with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit, humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful. Now, Trollope, taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with literal truth to nature.
This photographic realism of conversation is common enough now: but it has too often the defects of photography; it is bleared, coa.r.s.e, and ill-favoured. As we all know, in the new realism a young woman and her lover talk thus: "Old gal! why so glum?" said he--"It"s my luck!" says she, and flings her straw hat on the floor. That is the new photographic style, but it does not please us of an older generation.
Now Trollope makes his people utter such phrases as the characters he presents to us actually use in real life--or rather such phrases as they did use thirty years ago. And yet, although he hardly ever rises into eloquence, wit, brilliancy, or sinks into any form of talk either unnaturally tall, or unnaturally low,--still, the conversations are just sufficiently pointed, humorous, or characteristic, to amuse the reader and develop the speaker"s character. Trollope in this exactly hits the happy mean. Like Mr. Woodhouse"s gruel, his conversations are "thin--but not so very thin." He never attempts grandiloquence; but then he never sinks into the fashionable bathos of--"Sugar in your tea, dear?"--"Another lump, if you please,"--nor does he fall into the fashionable realism of--"Dry up, old man!" No! Trollope"s characters speaks with literal nature; and yet with enough of point, humour, vigour, to make it pleasant reading.
We may at once confess to his faults and limitations. They are plain enough, constant, and quite incapable of defence. Out of his sixty works, I should be sorry to pick more than ten as being worth a second reading, or twenty which are worth a first reading. Nor amongst the good books could I count any of the last ten years. The range of characters is limited to the clergy and professional men of a cathedral city, to the county families and the respectabilities of a quiet village, to the life of clubs, public offices, and Parliament in London, and to the ways of "society" as it existed in England in the third quarter of the present century. The plots are neither new nor ingenious; the incidents are rarely more than commonplace; the characters are seldom very powerful, or original, or complex. There are very few "psychologic problems," very few dramatic situations, very few revelations of a new world and unfamiliar natures. There are some natural scenes in Ireland; now and then a cook-maid, a farmer, a labourer, or a clerk, come on the stage and play their short parts with faultless demeanour. But otherwise, the entire company appear in the frock-coats and crinolines of the period, and every scene is played in silk hats, bonnets, and regulation evening toilette.
But within this limited range of life, this uniformity of "genteel comedy," Trollope has not seldom given us pieces of inimitable truthfulness and curious delicacy of observation. The dignitaries of the cathedral close, the sporting squires, the county magnates, the country doctors, and the rectory home, are drawn with a precision, a refinement, an absolute fidelity that only Jane Austen could compa.s.s.
There is no caricature, no burlesque, nothing improbable or over-wrought. The bishop, the dean, the warden, the curate, the apothecary, the duke, the master of fox-hounds, the bishop"s wife, the archdeacon"s lady, the vicar"s daughter, the governess, the undergraduate--all are perfectly true to nature. So, too, are the men in the clubs in London, the chiefs, subordinates, and clerks in the public offices, the ministers and members of Parliament, the leaders, and rank and file of London "society." They never utter a sentence which is not exactly what such men and women do utter; they do and they think nothing but what such men and women think and do in real life.
Their habits, conversation, dress, and interests are photographically accurate, to the point of illusion. It is not high art--but it is art.
The field is a narrow one; the actors are ordinary. But the skill, grace, and humour with which the scenes are caught, and the absolute illusion of truthfulness, redeem it from the commonplace.
The stage of Trollope"s drama is not a wide one, but it is far wider than that of Jane Austen. His plots and incidents are sufficiently trite and ordinary, but they are dramatic and original, if contrasted with those of _Emma_ or _Mansfield Park_. No one will compare little Jane"s delicate palfrey with Anthony"s big-boned hunter; nor would any one commit the bad taste of treating these quadrupeds as if they were entered for a race; but a narrow stage and familiar incidents are not necessarily fatal to true art. If Trollope had done nothing more than paint ordinary English society with photographic accuracy of detail, it would not be a great performance. But he has done more than this. In the Ba.r.s.etshire series, at any rate, he has risen to a point of drawing characters with a very subtle insight and delicate intuition. The warden, the bishop, Mrs. Proudie, Dr. Thorne, Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lady Arabella, and, above all, Mr. Crawley, are characters definitely conceived, profoundly mastered, and truly portrayed. Trollope evidently judged Crawley to be his greatest creation, and the _Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et_ to be his princ.i.p.al achievement. In this he was doubtless right. There are real characters also in the two _Phineas Finn_ tales. Chiltern, Finn, Glencora Palliser, Laura Kennedy, and Marie Goesler, are subtly conceived and truly worked out. This is enough to make a decent reputation, however flat be the interminable pot-boilers that precede and follow them.
The list of Trollope"s real successes is not very long. The six tales of the Ba.r.s.etshire cycle, _The Warden_, _Barchester Towers_, _Doctor Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_, _The Small House at Allington_, _The Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et_, are unquestionably his main achievements; and of these either _Doctor Thorne_ or _The Last Chronicle_ is the best. The Crawley story is undoubtedly the finest thing Trollope ever did; but for myself, I enjoy the unity, completeness, and masterly scheme of _Doctor Thorne_, and I like Mary Thorne better than any of Trollope"s women. If, to the six Ba.r.s.et tales, we add _Orley Farm_, _The Claverings_, the two _Phineas Finns_, and the _Eustace Diamonds_, we shall include, perhaps, more than posterity will ever trouble itself about, and almost exactly one-fifth of the novels he left behind. The ten or twelve of Trollope"s best will continue to be read, and will, in a future generation, no doubt, regain not a little of their early vogue. This will be due, in part, to their own inherent merit as graceful, truthful, subtle observation of contemporary types, clothed in a style of transparent ease. Partly, it will be due to this: that these tales will reproduce for the future certain phases of life in the nineteenth century in England with minute fidelity and the most literal realism.
This is no doubt the cause of the revulsion of opinion by which in some English circles Trollope has suffered of late. If there are fashions, habits, and tastes which the rising generation is certain to despise, it is such as were current in the youth of their own parents about thirty or forty years before them. The collars, the bonnets, the furniture, the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the young to be the last word of all that is awkward and "bad form,"
although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the emanc.i.p.ated youth of our time all that was "ba.n.a.l" and prosy some thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven, or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new h.e.l.l. Novels or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no s.e.xual theorems to solve, with no unique idiosyncrasies to fathom, without anything unnatural, or sickening, without hospital nastinesses,--are all, we are a.s.sured, unworthy the notice of the youth of either s.e.x who are really up to date. In the style of the new p.o.r.nographic and clinical school of art, the sayings and doings of wholesome men and women who live in drawing-rooms and regularly dress before dinner are "beastly rot," and fit for no one but children and old maids.
But we conservatives of an older school are grateful to Anthony that he produced for the last generation an immense collection of pleasant tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident. It was his boast that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read without a blush. This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so often denounced as _pa.s.se_. His tales, of course, are full of love, and the love is not always discreet or virtuous. There are cases of guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning pa.s.sion. But there is not an impure or prurient pa.s.sage in the whole library of tales. Much more than this: in the centre of almost every tale, we are taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl.
In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight more than when he unveils to us the secret thoughts of a n.o.ble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear brain and a pure will.
In nothing is he more successful; nowhere is he more subtle, more true, more interesting. In this fine gift, he surpa.s.ses all his contemporaries, and almost all other English novelists. Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts--I would almost add, Martha Dunstable--may not be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations. But they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women; and it does one good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts.
It must be admitted that they are "young ladies," nurtured in the conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be "maiden modesty"
thirty or forty years ago. That is their misfortune to-day; it is now rather silly to be a "young lady" at all, and the old-fashioned "maiden modesty" of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively ridiculous. Young women of the present date, we are a.s.sured in the language of our gilded youth, have to be either "jolly girls" or "crocks"; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not "jolly girls." Their trials and agonies are not different from those which may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve are those which may await any girl at any time. But the subtle touches with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing of competing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral crisis--are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations.
Trollope is equally successful with some other social problems and characters of unstable equilibrium. They are none of them very profound or exalted studies in psychology; but they are truthful, natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarra.s.sed estate; the honest and impulsive youth placed between love and duty; the loving girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position who does not know his own mind; the man with honest principles who is tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin--all of these live in the pages of Trollope with perfect truth to nature and reality of movement. It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair"s-breadth the probable and natural conduct of such persons.
All this is now said to be commonplace, goody-goody, and Philistine.
There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, c.r.a.pulous prost.i.tutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope. But they who can exist without these stimulants may find pleasant reading yet in his best work. _The Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et_ is a really good tale which deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of fine imaginative work. _Doctor Thorne_ is a sound, pleasant, ingenious story from beginning to end. It has perhaps the best plot of all Trollope"s books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he admits not to be his own. I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and Doctor Thorne as one of his best men. The unity of _Doctor Thorne_ is very striking and ingenious. The stage is crowded: there are nearly a score of well-marked characters and five distinct households; but the whole series works into the same plot; the scene is constantly varied, and yet there is no double plot or separate companies. Thus, though the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the interest and the movement never flag for a page. The machinery is very simple; the characters are of average strength and merit; the incidents and issues are ordinary enough. And the general effect is wholesome, manly, womanly, refined, and true to nature.
The episcopal and capitular group of ecclesiastics round the Cathedral of Barchester is Trollope"s main creation, and is destined to endure for some time. It is all in its way inimitably true and subtly graduated from bishop to dean, from dean to canon, and so on through the whole chapter down to the verger and the porter. The relations of these dignitaries to each other, the relation of their woman-kind to each other, the relation of the clerical world to the town world and to the county world, their conventional etiquette, their jealousies, their feuds, their scandals, and their entertainments, are all marked with admirable truth and a refined touch. The relation of the village respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious precision and subtle discrimination. When _The Warden_ appeared just forty years ago, I happened to be a pupil in the chambers of the late Sir Henry Maine, then a famous critic of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_; and I well remember his interest and delight in welcoming a new writer, from whom he thought so much might be expected. The relations of London "Society" to the parliamentary and ministerial world as described in Trollope"s later books are all treated with entire mastery. It is this thorough knowledge of the organism of English society which specially distinguishes Trollope. It is a quality in which Thackeray alone is his equal; and Thackeray himself has drawn no complex social organism with such consummate completeness as Trollope"s Barchester Close. It is of course purely English, locally true to England only. But it is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "solid and substantial," "as real as if it were a great lump out of the earth,"--"just as English as a beefsteak."
What makes all that so strange is this, that when he began to write novels, Trollope had far less experience than have most cultivated men of cathedral closes, rectories, and county families. He had never been to a college, and till past middle life he never had access to the higher grades of English society. He never at any time, and certainly not when the Barchester cycle began, had any footing whatever in clerical circles, and but little intimate acquaintance with young ladies of birth and refinement in country homes. He never was much thrown with the young bloods of the army, of the universities, or of Parliament. He rarely consorted with dukes or county magnates, and he never lived in the centre of the political world. Yet this rough, self-taught busy Post-Office surveyor in Ireland, perpetually travelling about the country on the inspections of his duty, managed to see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner histories of the duke"s castle and the squire"s home, into the secret musings of the rector"s daughter, and into the tangled web of parliamentary intrigue. He did all this with a perfectly sure and subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly true, never extravagant, never unreal. And, to add to the wonder, you might meet him for an hour; and, however much you might like his bluff, hearty, resonant personality, you would have said he was the last man to have any delicate sympathy with bishops, dukes, or young ladies.
His insight into parliamentary life was surprisingly accurate and deep.
He had not the genius of Disraeli, but his pictures are utterly free from caricature or distortion of any kind. In his photographic portraiture of the British Parliament he surpa.s.sed all his contemporaries; and inasmuch as such studies can only have a local and sectional interest, they have probably injured his popularity and his art. His conduct of legal intricacies and the ways of lawyers is singularly correct; and the long and elaborate trial scene in _Phineas Redux_ is a masterpiece of natural and faithful descriptions of an Old Bailey criminal trial in which "society" happens to be involved. Yet of courts of law, as of bishops" palaces, rectory firesides, the lobbies of Parliament, and ducal "house parties," Trollope could have known almost nothing except as an occasional and outside observer. The life of London clubs, the habits and _personnel_ of a public office, the hunting-field, and the social hierarchy and ten commandments observed in a country town--these things Trollope knew to the minutest shade, and he has described them with wonderful truth and zest.
There was a truly pathetic drollery in his violent pa.s.sion for certain enjoyments--hunting, whist, and the smoking-room of his club. I cannot forget the comical rage which he felt at Professor Freeman"s attack on fox-hunting. I am not a sporting man myself; and, though I may look on fox-hunting as one of the less deadly sins involved in "sport," I know nothing about it. But it chanced that as a young man I had been charged with the duty of escorting a certain young lady to a "meet" of fox-hounds in Ess.e.x. A fox was found; but what happened I hardly remember; save this, that, in the middle of a hot burst, I found myself alongside of Anthony Trollope, who was shouting and roaring out "What!--what are you doing here?" And he was never tired of holding me up to the scorn of the "Universe" club as a deserter from the principles of Professor Freeman and John Morley. I had taken no part in the controversy, but it gave him huge delight to have detected such backsliding in one of the school he detested. Like other sporting men who imagine that their love of "sport" is a love of nature, when it is merely a pleasure in physical exercise, Trollope cared little for the poetic aspect of nature. His books, like Thackeray"s, hardly contain a single fine picture of the country, of the sea, of mountains, or of rivers. Compared with Fielding, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, d.i.c.kens, George Eliot, he is a man blind to the loveliness of nature. To him, as to other fox-hunters, the country was good or bad as it promised or did not promise a good "run." Though Trollope was a great traveller, he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel. His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight, his systematic whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and irrepressible energy in everything--formed one of the marvels of the last generation. And that such a colossus of blood and bone should spend his mornings, before we were out of bed, in a.n.a.lysing the hypersensitive conscience of an archdeacon, the secret confidences whispered between a prudent mamma and a love-lorn young lady, or the subtle meanderings of Marie Goesler"s heart--this was a real psychologic problem.