THE first thing to be noticed in the critical consideration of the work of any English Victorian novelist is that, before 1870, in England no one thought of the novel as a work of art.
Fielding wrote about the novel, Jane Austen talked about it, Scott thumped it on the back, Thackeray patronised it, Dickens used it as a vehicle for every kind of fun but had never time to treat it with real consideration, the Brontes adapted it to their poetic longing, George Eliot (at times a superb artist) transformed it into a pulpit; it was not until that thrilling winter of 1870-71 when a young architect in London published his first novel Desperate Remedies, a neglected work called The Adventures of Harry Richmond banged loosely about the Circulating Library shelves, and a youth in Edinburgh, ill-considered by his relatives, sent an essay or two about Penny Whistles to the London magazines, that the English novel thought about getting some new clothes and walking the town as an Artist.
In all the honest downright pages of the Autobiography there is not a word to show that Anthony Trollope ever considered the novel as an Art. He considered it first as an impulse for his own entertainment and happiness; secondly as a means of livelihood; thirdly as his principal proof of self-justification.
Let us make no mistake about the first of these, his delight in his impulse of creation. That same impulse is now for us half his power. Apart altogether from any question of artistic merit, the novelist who writes because he must is well on the way towards compelling us to listen to him. The history of the novel is strewn with the corpses of those who, driven by inward frenzy to tell their story, had nevertheless no story to tell; but at least we feel for them a kind of envious admiration of their impulse.
With Trollope it was not so much that he had a story to tell — indeed any kind of a story would do, the same old story many times repeated — as that he had people to discover, and the first great quality of his charm and power lies just in this, that he is as deeply pleased as we are at the acquaintances and friendships that he is for ever making. We are there with him at the very moment of the first meeting. He does not, as Flaubert does, embalm his friends first, or, as Dickens does, turn them into a ghost, an Aunt Sally, or a Christmas pudding, or, as Balzac does, introduce them to us only after he has, by diligent detective work, discovered all the worst about them — no, we are there at the very moment of the first shake of the hand. We do not know, any more than he does, what is going to come of this.
“Mr. Trollope — Mrs. Proudie,” and we can see Mr. Trollope, a little shy, covering his embarrassment with a good deal of noise, his eyes kindly gleaming behind his spectacles. What Mrs. Proudie thinks of Mr. Trollope we can guess, but we shall never know.
We therefore take our risks and our chances with him, but we have all the fun of stepping along at his side. We can see just why he is pleased, excited, amused, indignant. We can speculate, as he can, whether this meeting is or is not going to take us anywhere.
Whether, however, we allow ourselves to share Trollope’s creative experiences or no — we may be temperamentally unfitted for it — we cannot deny the evidences of his own excitement. He is really, in these initial stages, not thinning of us at all, and so he rouses additionally our curiosity. We know him to be an honest man, not easily deceived, unlikely to be taken in by something of no sort of value, and so, as we watch him thus deeply absorbed, we want to share in his discoveries. Critics are often puzzled by the survival of novels that seem to have no sort of artistic merit; they survive because there still blows through them a little breath of their author’s original excitement. We feel kindly towards him because he was once so genuinely moved.
Not even the most, pedestrian of the Trollope novels — not Lady Anna nor Marion Fay — is altogether without this breath of creative stir.
Secondly, Trollope wrote novels because he made a good living in that way.
Everyone knows now that the publication of the Autobiography after his death killed his contemporary public — it killed it because it shocked it, and it shocked it because, in this book, Trollope said that he wrote novels for money and worked to the tick of the clock.
Now of course we have changed all that. The point is no longer whether you write novels for money, but rather whether you get money for the novels that you write, and, as to the working to the tick of the clock, many novelists to-day have offices in the City and take Saturday afternoon off only.
No, we respect Trollope now for the very sins that once long ago damned him. Whether he might not have written better novels had his methods not been so desperately regular is a question, however, that may still be asked, and must, in a little later, be answered.
‘ Here and now it is sufficient to record that his second impulse was mercenary. He wrote because he liked, it and because he couldn’t help himself, but he wrote also because he wanted money and because he wanted a good deal. And he got what he wanted.
His third impulse was one of self-justification. Here for a moment we must consider the physical man.
The standard presentation of him has become so definite as to be symbolic — almost Titanic in size — vast of shoulder and thigh, astride a horse as Titanic as himself, or bursting into the Garrick Club, bellowing forth some greeting, slapping a friend on the back, involved quickly in some discussion, tempestuous in agreement or argument, hailing friends with a roar and enemies with a frown, hospitable, generous, enthusiastic, limited, bellicose, affectionate; and then behind this eager John Bull the second figure, rising at five-thirty of a morning (roused by the sleepy but ever punctual groom), hurrying to his study, setting his watch before him, then gravely, without a moment’s pause, slipping through the gates of his creation into his well-known country, meeting without surprise or hesitation Lady Glencora or Sowerby or Mr. Slope, striding down the High Street of Barchester or urging his nag down the lanes around Framley, not so much a creative artist as a recording citizen.
And then, behind this figure again, the third, the timid, shy, shrinking self-doubter of the early schooldays, longing for affection but trained to show no feeling, dreading always what the next day will bring, dirty, dishevelled, and above all self-humiliated.
These are the three figures in one that the Trollope fable now presents, and they lead quite naturally to a sentimental contrast.
No story in the world is quite so popular as the Cinderella story. Especially is this true in England, where sentiment runs so deep but demonstration of it is so sternly forbidden. The traditional Trollope is admirably suited to the British taste, being physically so typical a British figure and sentimentally so thorough a British fable. The wretched little, dirty, neglected schoolboy shows grit, independence, and honesty, and climbs, entirely unaided, to a position of splendid fame and financial independence. What is it but the Honest Apprentice all over again?
It would be absurd to pretend that Trollope himself was unaware of the fable — he makes it the text for a number of the pages of the Autobiography.
It was in part because he wished to win his own esteem of himself that he worked with so marvellous an industry, and it was for this same reason that he recorded with so much pleasure in his Autobiography the sums that he received and the hours that he laboured. He never sentimentalised about himself, but he also never lost entirely that sense that his early years drove into him of loneliness, uncertainty, and self-depreciation.
And because he never sentimentalised himself is a very good reason why we should not sentimentalise him either. The reaction from the Victorian scene has undoubtedly in his case been towards a Georgian romanticism. He would not thank us for this. He would acknowledge perhaps that he worked hard because his school years were difficult to forget, but he would not, I think, be especially grateful to one or two recent critics for their sighs over his hardships. He wants no man’s pity.
Because he wrote creatively, commercially, and self-morally, his novels are amateur, commercial, and honest.
When we say that his novels are amateur, we mean that they are not professional. When does a novel become professional? When a novelist has learnt the trick of his trade so thoroughly that that trick has come in between himself and his creative vision. All novels of the first class show victories over professional technique won by creative passion. The technique is there, but the creative passion (which is amateur because it is incalculable and obeys no laws) has not been slain by it.
One of the finest works existing on the novel — Mr. Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction — fails to be finally universal in its applied rules because it does not allow room enough for creative zest and the unbounded powers of creative zest.
Trollope’s creative zest was his finest quality, but because the amateur ignored too completely the powers of the technical professional he was prevented from being a novelist of the first class, of the class of Tolstoi, Fielding, Flaubert, and Balzac.
In scenes like the race-course chapter from Anna Karenina, the theatre scene in Madame Bovary, the sword-flashing pages in Far from the Madding Crowd, we are aware of a superb union between creative freedom and technical discipline. The creator, although carried away by his vision, is nevertheless sternly the conscious artist. The intensity of his vision is equalled by the magnificent austerity of his technique.
But Trollope, even in his most intense scenes, has the loose hold of the amateur on his material. His vision is not sufficiently fixed to be sufficiently intense. He sees things with the greatest vividness, but for a moment only. He passes as the scene passes, gaily, lightly, without any apprehension that he has not, perhaps, been artistic enough.
Secondly, his novels are commercial because he often sacrificed their artistic needs for money.
It is not possible for us to be shocked as his contemporaries were by the assertion that authors write for money, but it is at the same time a quite legitimate inquiry whether, in any individual artist’s case, writing for money has damaged the art. In Trollope’s case it quite certainly has done so. To write by the clock is not at all inartistic unless the clock becomes of more importance than the art, as unquestionably in Trollope’s case it did at times become — as for instance when we hear of him finishing a novel ten minutes before the allotted hour and beginning at once another in order that the time should be properly filled.
It is also no artistic crime to permit your novel to be published serially — or at least it is not so until the serial necessities become of more importance than your novel. Had Trollope said: “I have finished this book, writing it without any thought of serial publication. If you wish to publish it serially, but exactly as it is, I have no objection,” then no harm is done. But if Trollope in his desire to retain his serial market pads and lengthens his stories, corrects their incidents so that they do not shock possible readers, moulds his characters by his idea of serial moralities, then his commercial aim is interfering with his artistic aim.
Thirdly, however, the honesty of his work very often saves him. Of all novelists the world has ever known, he is more free than any from one of the curses of the novelist’s psychology, humbug.
There is no dishonesty in him anywhere. If he is writing for money he is writing for money, if he is moral he is moral, if he is pleasing an editor he is pleasing an editor. He cheats himself in nothing, and that is possibly another reason why he is not an artist of the first rank, cheating oneself being at least half of the artist’s obligation to his imagination. Trollope’s imagination never carried him off his feet, and when a magazine wanted such-and-such a story for which it was willing to pay a sufficient amount, he was, for the time being, servant of that magazine.
It is, however, obvious that honesty alone is not enough to keep a book alive — many an honest work has been born at tea-time and died, poor infant, before lights are out. These novels of Trollope’s must have some very great preservative qualities, qualities that have upheld and supported them when many far more pretentious volumes have passed utterly away.
The first of Trollope’s great qualities is his sense of space.
Here I would quote Mr. E. M. Forster in his most interesting book, Aspects of the Novel. Speaking of Tolstoi he says:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot exactly say what struck them. They do not arise from the story, though Tolstoi is quite as interested in what comes next as Scott, and quite as sincere as Bennett. They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns, Auld Reekie, and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoi’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.
It may seem as audacious to compare the art of Trollope with the art of Tolstoi as to place the tidy fields and primrose lanes of England beside the steppes and vast horizons of Russia; but these writers and these countries have certain things in common.
Tolstoi was the conscious artist, and when he prepared the huge canvas of War and Peace it was a deliberate and far-seeing effort. When Trollope adventured through the opening pages of The Warden he did not know where he would find himself next. We can see him fumbling at every page, stumbling into satire as he clothes the Grantley boys in the garments of three famous bishops of the moment or, rather feebly, throws paper darts at Carlyle. So he began, but when we, his readers, look back on the whole panorama of the Barsetshire and political novels we get something far wider, more generous, more enduring than a mere clever evocation of place. We get not only Barchester and its country roads and lanes, but all mid-Victorian England, and then, beyond that again, a realisation of a whole world of human experience and intention. If it is “the sum total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields” which give War and Peace its sonority and amplitude, so it is the sum total of vicarage gardens, High Streets in sunlight, London rooms and corners, cathedral precincts, passages in the House of Commons, drawing-room tea-tables, the bars of public-houses and the sandy floors of country inns, the hedges, ditches, sloping fields of the Hunt driving the fox to his last lair, that give these Barchester novels their great size and quality.
This art of space is exceedingly rare in the artist’s equipment. Jane Austen had great sense of place and little of space; it is one of the greatest gifts of Thomas Hardy, but such opposite writers as Stevenson and Gissing possessed almost nothing of it, Treasure Island and New Grub Street with all their great virtues being contained within the compass of a sea-chest and a lodger’s second-floor back.
Trollope had the gift because everything was of significance to him. It is true that this significance was material and nothing carried him farther than he could see it — nevertheless his vision of material things was infinite and swings us far beyond his immediate characters and narrative.
The value of his sense of space is greatly heightened by his constant preoccupation with average humanity. He is the supreme English novelist in this. That claim has been made for Fielding who, in Tom Jones and Amelia and Parson Adams, had average humanity always in front of him, but his own personality is richer, odder, of greater genius than Trollope’s, and it is humanity plus Fielding that we are given in his novels. Something of the same may be said of Jane Austen, whose human beings, Mr. Collins and Mrs. Norris and Miss Bates, and the others of that great gallery, would all be average humanity if the reader saw them first — but Jane Austen (and we thank heaven for it) is always there before us. Of our own good luck we might have met Mr. Collins and thought him amusingly odd, but neither so odd nor so amusing as Miss Austen shows him to be.
It is one of the most remarkable things about Trollope as a novelist that we get almost nothing of his personality in our contact with his characters. Granted a certain average power of observation, we should, if we lived in Barchester, see Archdeacon Grantley and Lucy Robarts and Mr. Sowerby almost exactly as Trollope sees them. Very rarely he heightens character by the personal intensity that he feels for it. Mr. Slope is thus heightened, so is the Signora, so also is Mrs. Proudie, but even here they are heightened as much by his interest in his narrative as by his interest in character. The Signora and Mr. Slope are not quite average humanity, but they are two of the very few exceptions that prove this general Trollopian rule.
Acute though his observation of detail is, he does not psychologically notice very much more in his characters than the average man would notice. Having, from the first, discovered the almost fanatical personal pride of Mr. Crawley, combining this with his extreme poverty he has at once his motive for an immensely long novel. Almost anyone, meeting Mr. Crawley, must at once have discovered these same two things. Trollope makes no more discoveries about him. Crawley is not revealed to us in ever-deepening succession of motives, contrasts, elemental passions as old Karamazov is developed, or the heroine of Smoke, or the beautiful Kate Croy of The Wings of the Dove. These two elemental conditions of Crawley are emphasised for us again and again just as Dickens, having discovered a red nose or a flowery waistcoat or a high collar in a character, hammers that on to the table and leaves it there.
But just because there are so few psychological discoveries are we given a constant sense of rest and contentment. In a Trollope novel we discover as much about the characters as we discover about our fellow human beings. We are not startled or horrified, not plunged, as we so often are in a novel by Balzac or Dostoievsky, or even in a short story by Tchehov, into a kind of outer darkness of loneliness. “Are our fellows like this?” we cry. “Am I like this? Why, then, I have known nothing of life at all.”
But Trollope reassures us, telling us that all is well; we know quite as much of the mystery as he himself does.
It is this reassurance about our common humanity that is responsible for so much of his extraordinarily effective reality.
Within the confines of his own kingdom he is absolutely real. There is no novelist, save Balzac, who gives us so certain a conviction of entering his doors, sitting on his chairs, eating from his tables.
But it is of course not only a reality of material surroundings. We touch the very clothes of his human beings and stand at their elbows as they talk. Open a Trollope novel where you will and you will find dialogue of an astonishing realism, realism of word and accent and casual repetition. Realism, too, it must be confessed, of length and looseness. Opening Barchester Towers quite at hazard, I come upon this:
“Well, Slope,” said the Bishop somewhat impatiently; for, to tell the truth, he was not anxious just at present to have much conversation with Mr. Slope.
“Your lordship will be sorry to hear that as yet the poor dean has shown no sign of amendment.”
“Oh — ah — hasn’t he? Poor man! I’m sure I’m very sorry. I suppose Sir Omicron has not arrived yet?”
“No, not till the 9.15 P.M. train.”
“I wonder they didn’t have a special. They say Dr. Trefoil is very rich.”
“Very rich, I believe,” said Mr. Slope. “But the truth is, all the doctors in London can do no good, no other good than to show that every possible care has been taken. Poor Dr. Trefoil is not long for this world, my lord.”
“I suppose not — I suppose not.”
“Oh no; indeed, his best friends could not wish that he should outlive such a shock, for his intellects cannot possibly survive it.”
“Poor man! Poor man!” said the Bishop.
“It will naturally be a matter of much moment to your lordship who is to succeed him,” said Mr. Slope. “It would be a great thing if you could secure the appointment for some person of your own way of thinking on important points. The party hostile to us are very strong here in Barchester — much too strong.”
“Yes, yes. If poor Dr. Trefoil is to go, it will be a great thing to get a good man in his place.”
“It will be everything to your lordship to get a man on whose co-operation you can reckon. Only think what trouble we might have if Dr. Grantley or Dr. Hyandry or any of that way of thinking were to get it.”
“It is not very probable that Lord — will give it to any of that school; why should he?”
“No. Not probable; certainly not; but it is possible, great interest will probably be made. If I might venture to advise your lordship, I would suggest that you should discuss the matter with his grace next week. I have no doubt that your wishes, if made known and backed by his grace, would be paramount with Lord — .”
“Well, I don’t know that; Lord — has always been very kind to me, very kind. But I am unwilling to interfere in such matters unless asked. And indeed, if asked, I don’t know whom, at this moment, I should recommend.”
How admirable is this dialogue! How revealing of the two characters concerned and how dramatically it forwards the necessities of the narrative!
That “Poor man” of the Bishop’s, the little comment on the Dean’s wealth displaying a whole world of past surmises, social curiosities and possibly, via Mrs. Proudie, social jealousies! And how completely revealing are Mr. Slope’s words, his mixture of sycophancy, cunning, self-ambition, his knowledge of his Bishop, the eagerness of his own plans, so that we can almost hear the agitated beating of his heart, his impertinence and, at the same time, his cowardice — all these things are here.
But the naturalness of this dialogue and of a thousand others like it contains more than a revelation of character and an adroit furtherance of narrative. Trollope caught a certain natural rhythm of human speech and has never been excelled in this, save possibly by Henry James in his earlier novels.
In the dialogue of the very greatest novelists there is often a suggestion that something has been arranged for our benefit (it is indeed the deliberate intention of the modern novelist that dialogue should be so adroitly arranged as to appear to have no arrangement), but the characters in Trollope talk as though their conversation has been reported for us in shorthand and yet at the same time the dialogue does forward the story and does reveal the characters.
It is also true that, in the later novels at least, this trick of natural dialogue was so easy to Trollope that he seriously betrayed his gift and tumbled into garrulity.
His further reality of surroundings is secured in the same way. He does not appear to be arranging the scenery for us. His country houses, for instance (and no one has ever given us, stone for stone and brick for brick, more real country houses), are introduced to us exactly as they are. They do not glow with the poetic light that novelists from Richardson to Henry James and Virginia Woolf have shone upon them, nor have they that bare sort of auctioneer’s reality that the buildings in George Gissing and Arnold Bennett display. Trollope says about them the things that we (again allowing for his heightened genius of observation) might say were we on a country walk or paying an afternoon call. In the political novels indeed it is noticeable that he makes the stones and carpets of the House of Commons more real and actual than the events that occur among them.
He loves especially the low taprooms and minor lodging-houses of his own contemporary London. We are especially glad to have them because we can see exactly what they were like without the colour of Dickens’s transmuting genius. Were we back in the London of fifty years ago, it is the reality of Trollope that we would recognise, the fantasy of Dickens that we would sigh for.
His reality indeed is saved from being journalistic because of his excitement as creator, but it is often only just saved. When he is not excited (and there are such occasions), but is padding for the benefit of his serial, we might be seeing his fields and streets through the eyes of a contemporary newspaper, but our reward for some dreary passages is our ultimate conviction of his truth. He never betrays us, however pedestrian his novel may be, by deliberately falsifying his vision.
It is true, of course (as indeed of every artist it is true), that he has, very seriously, the defects of his qualities.
That sense of space is a dangerous virtue for a novelist, and Tolstoi himself by no means escapes the charge of securing it sometimes by looseness and casual methods of attack. Trollope’s looseness is one of his gravest sins. It comes not only from the necessity of serial publications, but also from his own casual attitude as artist, which is again part of his early Victorian tradition.
He has all the Victorian temptation to address the friendly reader, and horrible the consequences sometimes are. Henry James in his essay on “Trollope” marks this for the crime that it is once and for all.
These little slaps at credulity [he says] are very discouraging, but they are even more inexplicable, for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged from the point of view of that rather vague consideration of form which is the only canon we have a right to impose upon Trollope.
It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as a historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic, he must relate events that are supposed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid story-tellers; we need only mention (to select a single instance) the magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him as Garrick or John Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the footlights. Therefore, when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention.
These are brave and true words. Trollope’s looseness here is all in the wicked tradition of Fielding and Scott, who gave the novel a chuck under the chin and thought that they were doing her a favour. It comes also from a sort of deprecatory submission to the overconsidered reader— “If you don’t like this, dear reader”, one can hear Trollope only too often saying, “then I have, I fear, almost no justification at all”.
Another bad habit, part also of his looseness of form, is his desperate affection for punning surnames — Mr. Neversay Die, Mr. Sentiment, Mr. Stickatit, and so on. Henry James on this, too, says the final word:
There is a person mentioned in The Warden under the name of Mr. Quiverful — a poor clergyman, with a dozen children, who holds the living of Puddingdale. This name is a humorous allusion to his overflowing nursery, and it matters little so long as he is not brought to the front. But in Barchester Towers, which carries on the history of Hiram’s Hospital, Mr. Quiverful becomes, as a candidate for Mr. Harding’s vacant place, an important element, and the reader is made proportionately unhappy by the primitive character of this satiric note. A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen children (which is the number attained in Barchester Towers) is too difficult to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children, but we cannot manage the combination.
Here again Trollope is simply unable to regard the novel seriously enough. Why should he not have his little joke if it so pleases him? Better men than he have enjoyed it. That he is altogether too good for his little joke he is too modest to perceive.
His remarkable gift, too, of presenting average humanity without either caricature or poetic licence has its disadvantages. One can have almost too much at times of average humanity, and there are moments in the middle of almost any long Trollope novel when we long for the sudden appearance of a leprechaun, a satyr, or a water nymph.
He succumbs more than any other novelist of his class to the dangers of monotony and repetition.
It has been noticed already that one plot — the distresses and manœuvres of one girl and two men or one man and two girls — serves him a great many times too often. One wonders indeed that he has the gay impertinence so shamelessly to serve it up again and again. It happens, too, that it is a plot which, because of the restrictions of Victorian morality, he is unable to treat thoroughly. His heroine in love with a rogue must appear again and again an addle-pated fool, because the real physical fascination that love has for her must be almost completely unanalysed. Lily Dale calls her Crosbie an Apollo, is embraced by him, and writes him one or two very eloquent letters, but her temperament can be, because of contemporary pruderies, only half revealed to us, and so we, before the end, feel ourselves exceedingly impatient with her dallying moods.
We are tantalised, too, because we realise that Trollope understood very thoroughly the psychology of physical love. We may be thankful for his reticences (they are responsible for a great deal of his charm in these so-unreticent days), but wish that he had not so continually chosen a theme that the conventions of his public forbade him to explore.
Much too of his monotony and repetition came from his serial necessities and his publication in monthly parts. Thackeray and Dickens, who were more exuberant artists than Trollope, found the publication of their novels in monthly parts a terrible trial, but the real trouble about Trollope was that he never found it a trial at all.
He went gaily and steadily forward, padding his very exiguous plot with still more exiguous comedy. How fine and tragic a work, for instance, might He Knew He was Right have been had it not been lengthened to such spider-web thinness! How depressing and wearying is the comic element in Can You Forgive Her? how infinitely too long Is He Popenjoy? or The American Senator.
The easy rhythm of his dialogue tempts him to cover page after page with conversation so casual that it has finally no meaning at all. In many of the later novels his narrative tensity slackens to such a feebleness that when the big scenes do arrive he has lost the power of heightening his tone. In The Wary We Live Now and some of the shorter stories that closed his career he remarkably recovered his early dramatic power, and it is noticeable that the majority of these later books were published neither serially nor in monthly numbers.
There is also a monotony of moral values, but this is due to his own honest acceptance of all the Victorian moral traditions. There is for him no standing between good conduct and bad. That does not mean that he has not often a tenderness for his sinners, but he has never the slightest doubt but that sinners they are. His heroines are especially dedicated to the same lines of moral conduct. They may wriggle, twist, and turn, but matrimony is waiting inevitably for them at the end of the chapter.
It comes, however, to this, that, after all is said, first on this side and then on that, the central secret, the key to the pattern on the carpet, remains to be discovered. We may name Trollope a good realistic novelist, say that he was a creator of men and women but no creator of original or arresting ideas, that he had an especial gift for the portrayal of average humanity, that he stands for this or that in his estimate of Victorian things — we may state a thousand facts and yet miss the one quality, that gives him the uniqueness that an artist must have if he is to survive.
The astonishment that critics feel at the sudden disappearance of some apparently brilliant work, its defeat for immortality by some far more commonplace and ordinary affair, comes precisely from this — that the brilliant work has not proved itself to be unique or has not at its heart certain personal sincerities and genuine emotions that provide the uniqueness of the average human being.
None of Trollope’s fine qualities — not his minute observation, nor his “Englishness”, nor his humour, nor his gentle satire, nor the breadth and variety of his canvas would have kept him so magnificently alive had it not been for one virtue which runs like a silver thread through all the texture of his work, which makes him our companion and friend with an intimacy that is an intimacy of personality rather than of talent.
The late Sir Walter Raleigh in one of his Letters has stated the exact character of this quality in Trollope so admirably that he has been often quoted. He shall be quoted again:
Trollope starts off with ordinary people that bore you in life and in books, and makes an epic of them because he understands affection which the others take for granted or are superior about.
Henry James summarises his whole estimate of Trollope with this judgement:
His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the “usual”.
We may indeed take these two judgements together and find them complementary the one of the other. His appreciation of the usual is precisely his affection for the usual. He has that greatest of all human gifts — love of his fellow human beings without consciousness that he loves them. He loves them as he breathes; he loves them and laughs at them and swears at them and preaches at them just as he loves and laughs and swears and preaches at himself. There are moods and thoughts and mean impulses, lusts and cruelties which he detests in himself just as he detests the Crosbies and the Kennedys in his novel world.
There are weaknesses and follies in himself of which he is ashamed, but towards which he feels a certain friendliness just as he despises in a friendly manner his Sowerbys and Slopes.
There is the hobbledehoy in him, a legacy from his youth, so that he is himself John Eames; and there is something of the shy, affectionate, almost sentimental woman in him so that he understands with a beautiful sympathy the loneliness and pride of Lucy Robarts and Grace Crawley. But best of all does he have his being and live his life in sympathy with such men as Will Belton and Dr. Wortle, and they are men, too, who love their fellow human beings without knowing it, without pose, without self-satisfaction, almost without self-analysis.
Without poetry too, you may say. Yes, Trollope is the Commentator rather than the Poet, the Rationalist rather than the Enthusiast. He has exactly that temper of his own Mid-Victorian England, evenly balanced, commercially ambitious, believing in what he sees and in that alone, or at least resolving that that is all that he will believe.
And because he lived so exactly in the temper of his own time he has become for us the ideal day-by-day Novelist, the artist of the Memoir, the Diary, the Casual Letter.
He had, of course, no sort of prevision of the remarkable and brilliant things that the English novel was to do after him.
As has already been suggested, he showed in his last years certain powers that would have made him not altogether a stranger to the mood of the modern novel. Where he could not have been completely at home is in the necessity for the modern novelist to be poet as well as novelist. It is not the place here to argue whether the modern novel has gained in symbolism what it has lost in matter of fact. Writers like Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Swinnerton, and others are still with us, supplying us with all the facts that we need. But the novelist as poet — the one great advance that the English novel in the last thirty years has made — implies so many added qualities, so many fresh defects, that another world from the definite actual world of Trollope has to be encountered.
This at least we can say, that a certain attitude of almost lazy disappointment in and disapproval of life betrayed by the modern novelist would be altogether foreign to Trollope’s view. He knew well how harsh and cruel and ugly life could be, but no experience of his own prevented him from finding life the most inspiriting, man-making, soul-rewarding experience. He savoured it with all the blood in his body from the first years when, neglected in body and despised in soul, he stumped down the muddy lanes to a school that he loathed, to the last years when he knew that his popularity was gone and his race was run.
His satire sprang from his humorous scorn of his own oddities and failures; of that deeper and more modern irony that implies that life has done the individual a desperate and impertinent injury, an irony that has its source in an affronted egotism, he knew nothing at all.
That is why he is the rest and refreshment to us that he is. His affections are natural and logical. He restores our own confidence, calls in our own distrust, laughs at our vanity without scorning us, and revives our pride in our own average humanity.