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ANTHONY TROLLOPE^[3]

Trollope's novels, like those of Jane Austen, are of the very essence of fiction. Whatever they may lack in verbal subtlety, in passion, in tragedy or in comedy of idea, they never lack that spiritual skeleton without which no structure of a story-teller's imagining can survive. Palaces more delicate, more romantic, more brilliant and more terrible than those of Trollope have been erected and have stood to win the admiration of posterity; but their splendour and their beauty are due more to the solid material that upholds their walls and roofs than to the skill and fancy of their decoration. Other palaces, because they lacked such invisible but vital solidity, have drawn for an hour the fickle favour of the crowd and then toppled into dust. It is easy, in fiction, to create a nine days' wonder, but hard indeed to win the esteem of ninety years.

3. For his consent to the reprinting of this Essay I am grateful to the Editor of the “Nineteenth Century and After.”

Trollope has achieved that victory. Oblivion can now never be his, for he has lived his bad times and survived. As must any artist worth the name, he suffered eclipse—temporary, indeed, but so severe as at one time to threaten permanence. He was scorned as dowdy and parochial by the brilliant metropolitans of a succeeding generation. Only in the hearts of quiet folk and among readers uninstructed in the genius of their own time were his books remembered and cherished.

Until, slowly and slowly, opinion has begun to change. Quality has outstayed vogue, and the latter comes smirking back to the smiles of a lover yesterday despised. Indeed, Trollope is in a fair way to become once again the fashion. For a while he will be honoured by the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. Then, when they have turned their volatile benevolence to some other quarter, he will settle firmly in the respect of the critical. And that will at once be fame and his deserts.

Any summary analysis of Trollope's individual novels is wellnigh impossible, in view not only of the bulk of his work but also of its scope and richness of content. His quality is more intangible and at the same time more concentrated than that of the other writers treated in this book. “Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable,” wrote Trollope himself. And again: “The primary object of a novelist is to please.” Readability has, in these latter days, become a term of condescension. But that is the fault of a superior age, and for the ten who use the word contemptuously there are ten thousand who, did they care to do so, would give it an older and a more honourable meaning. To them, as always to the large public of novel-readers, fiction, when it is not costume-romance, mystery-story, or topical propaganda, is a revelation of their own lives. It is this demand for an expression of emotions in which the normal reader can share that Trollope so amazingly satisfies. No précis of plot, no indication of social setting, of character types, nor of period, can in his case convey the essence of any particular novel.

Nevertheless his stories fall into certain specific categories, some of which form actual series of tales with characters reappearing from volume to volume, while others, although severally independent and self-contained, may be classified as belonging to one type of fiction or to another.

The best known group of novels is that dealing with the society of the city of Barchester and of the surrounding neighbourhood. The Chronicles of Barsetshire, as they have been called, are six in number:

The Warden (1855),

Barchester Towers (1857),

Doctor Thorne (1858),

Framley Parsonage (1861),

The Small House at Allington (1864), and

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

Although these famous stories undoubtedly contain much of Trollope's best work, they do not contain the whole of it. It is a mistake to suppose that they rank altogether higher than his other books, and one of the most disastrous results of the disfavour into which his novels fell after their author's death is that a wealth of really first-rate material, just because it is included in books of which the late eighties chose to forget the titles, lies hidden to-day and withdrawn from the enjoyment of modern readers.

Cases of such unmerited neglect are encountered immediately and among the novels of Trollope's second continuous and interconnected series. The “political” stories, like those of Barsetshire, are six in number:

Can You Forgive Her? (1864),

Phineas Finn (1869),

The Eustace Diamonds (1873),

Phineas Redux (1874),

The Prime Minister (1876), and

The Duke's Children (1880).

It is truly remarkable to what an extent these admirable tales have fallen into oblivion. Not only do they introduce many of Trollope's most masterly characters, but they present, vividly and with knowledge, the minds and manners of the political aristocracy, the social hangers-on, the Tadpoles and Tapers of the day. Speaking generally, the social setting of the political novels is different from that of The Chronicles of Barsetshire. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, seeing that the whole series takes its tone from the personalities of Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Lady Glencora, who, as the stories progress and by natural course of inheritance, become the Duke and Duchess of Omnium and the greatest of English nobility. Trollope's method is not slavishly to serialize the life story of any individual character or pair of characters. All the political novels have their own clearly defined plot. They are, however, all tinged with the compelling personalities of Lady Glencora and her husband, into which Trollope threw all that he had of art and enthusiasm.

Can You Forgive Her? is a long novel, concerned primarily with the troubles of a motherless girl who breaks an engagement with an oppressively upright man in order to return to a youthful love affair with a dissipated and unscrupulous cousin. Mr. Grey, the honourable man, gets in the end the wife he wants; but Trollope does not hesitate to show fairly the preference of a high-spirited girl for an adventurous rascal, and there will be many who, when the book is finished, will regret—a little ashamedly—that virtue has ultimately triumphed. In the life story of Lady Glencora Can You Forgive Her? is important, for it pictures her newly married and literally on the verge of running away from her shy, proud, inarticulate husband, with a beautiful young reprobate, whose previous intimacy with her the reader may imagine at his discretion. The fallibility of Lady Glencora is skilfully contrasted with that of Alice Vavasor, the heroine of the book; their circumstances are so similar, and yet the young women react to them so differently!

Phineas Finn is a tale of political ambition. The hero, by whose name the book is called, is a poor Irishman who comes to seek his fortune in Parliament. The ups and downs of his career; Lady Laura Kennedy, who loves him but from family pressure marries millions; Madame Max Goesler, the fascinating, mysterious widow who rejects flattering if dubious proposals from the old Duke of Omnium, combine with a mass of other material to make a really dramatic story that is continued, and equally well continued, in Phineas Redux.

Not the least remarkable feature of the second of these two books is the hero's trial for murder. Trollope has a genius for trial scenes, and to my mind it is an open question whether that in Phineas Redux is not finer than its more celebrated predecessors in The Three Clerks and in Orley Farm.

The Eustace Diamonds turns on the personality of Lizzie Eustace, a selfish but attractive little woman who keeps possession, in the teeth of lawyers and of her late husband's relations, of certain priceless jewels to which she has no right whatever. There are two or three subplots in the story, all of good quality; but the character of Lizzie Eustace, who, for all her lying and her insincerity and her cheap smartness, is seductive and appealing, stands out as the book's essential achievement.

The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children are the only two novels of the political series in which Plantagenet Palliser, now Duke of Omnium, is admittedly the central figure. The former book is so constructed as to give prominence to the love affair and unhappy marriage of Emily Wharton with Ferdinand Lopez, a stock gambler and commercial adventurer. But although the history of the Lopez ménage is admirably told, and gives scope for the reintroduction of Lizzie Eustace, as well as other strange and disreputable people, the story of the first premiership of the Duke of Omnium is the real story of the book. By the time he came to the writing of The Prime Minister, Trollope had become deeply interested in presenting in the person of the Duke his ideal conception of an English aristocrat. No praise can be too high for the skill with which he implies, but does not describe, the divergent qualities of ambition possessed by the Duke and by his wife. Throughout the book she is for ever striving to make him in the eye of the world the greatest gentleman of the greatest kingdom of all time. He, on the other hand, sees in his position only duty and responsibility and disappointment. Not the least of his troubles are his wife's insistence that the life of a public man is never private, and her expressed conviction that give and take is the essence of political compromise and therefore of premiership.

In the interval between The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children the Duchess of Omnium dies. The unhappy Duke is left to find, if he may, in the achievements of his children that completeness and success to secure which he feels that he has himself so utterly failed. Everything goes awry. His only daughter gives her love to an unknown and penniless commoner. His younger son, after ragging through his university career, resorts disastrously to cards and racing. Finally, his heir—Lord Silverbridge—stands for Parliament in the opposite interest to that of his father, and, worse still, turns from the girl the Duke has chosen as his bride, in order to throw his title and prospects at the feet of the beautiful daughter of an American savant. The Duke struggles against his own humanity; slowly and unhappily, as is his way, he adjusts himself to the changing times; at the last he sacrifices his ideals of nobility to personal affection. The Duke's Children worthily closes a series of fine novels. In some ways this last story of the political group is the best, and it speaks a good deal for the author's power of sustained imagination that he contrived, over a period of sixteen years, to maintain the interest and develop the vitality of so complex a collection of characters.

The rough classifications of novels in themselves independent may, out of respect for chronology, begin with the stories of Irish life. The Macdermotts of Ballycloran (1847), The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), Castle Richmond (1860) and The Landleaguers (1883), are the four books which belong, properly speaking, to this category. Of course there are Irish scenes in many other novels, for Trollope lived for years in Ireland, knew it well and loved it, and was for ever introducing Irishmen and Irish incidents into his work. The books above mentioned are, however, wholly and deliberately novels about Ireland. The first two have the faults of very early work, in that they are prolix and lack that control of character and material that marks the experienced novelist. Both, however, are worth reading, and the plot of The Kellys needs no excuse on the score of inexperience. Castle Richmond, however, is definitely an unsuccessful book. It is packed with information about the Irish famine, and the story is over-melodramatic for Trollope's method. One of his most characteristic qualities as a novelist is his refusal to keep the reader in suspense. In direct contrast to Wilkie Collins, he goes out of his way to explain, as he comes to it, each seemingly inexplicable event. It is as though he scorns to save himself the trouble of characterization by erecting between himself and the reader a screen of mystery. For this reason, the secret power exercised by the unsavoury Molletts over Sir Thomas Fitzgerald is, because it soon ceases to be secret, a weak foundation upon which to erect a story. The Landleaguers, the book left unfinished by Trollope when he died, is concerned to present the social condition of Ireland in the early eighties, as was Castle Richmond to depict that of the famine-ridden forties. And yet what a difference! In The Landleaguers the novelist presents his picture of politics in his actual story. There are no passages of blue-book instructionalism, but it is doubtful whether a more vivid impression of the state of Ireland at the time can be obtained from any other source. Even if there were no others among Trollope's old-age novels to disprove the theory, The Landleaguers alone should put an end to the contention that toward the end of his life he had lost his cunning or written himself out.

It is now necessary to examine that large and heterogeneous collection of novels which, from one point of view or another, satirize contemporary life or present some definite aspect of the English social scene. Let me once more insist that the classification of Trollope's books here attempted should not be understood too literally. All the Barchester novels, all the political novels, are in one sense wholly presentments of society; in the same way many of them contain passages definitely satirical. But they have other claims to special grouping which the numerous isolated stories now to be considered do not possess; and, while satire is mainly incidental to the tales of Barchester and to those of political life, it is in some at least of Trollope's other books the principal purpose of the story.

First, then, the books which may fairly be termed books of social satire. The earliest in date is The Bertrams, which, although the situations and characters are of the kind which Trollope was to make essentially his own, is a failure even more complete than Castle Richmond. The central theme is one to which the author more than once returns. Caroline Waddington rejects George Bertram for reasons of income and prospects. She marries his successful lawyer friend, only to find that she has sold herself to a greedy tyrant. The parallel case of Julia Brabazon and Harry Clavering immediately suggests itself; but where in The Claverings Trollope achieves an intense humanity, in The Bertrams he is dully mechanical. He allows the subsidiary plots to disturb and obscure his main story. When, as frequently, he attempts the comic in social enjoyment he comes clumsily to grief. The widow's seaside picnic in Can you Forgive Her? has only to be contrasted with the excursion from Jerusalem described in The Bertrams to make clear the difference between successful and unsuccessful satire. And yet there are points in The Bertrams. The close-fisted old man, the disposal of whose money provides the motive of most of the incident, is drawn with consistent restraint. There are touches in the description of society at Littlebath that prepare the reader for the pleasure of Miss Mackenzie. On the whole the book should be read. It is Trollope “off” (or rather “not yet on to”) his game, but it was published at an important moment in his career and helps to make clear his subsequent development.

Rachel Ray (1863) and Miss Mackenzie (1865) may, without any critical licence, be considered together. Both are bitter satires on Evangelical Christianity. Trollope inherited from his mother a hatred of the brimstone school of religious teachers, and in these novels he lets himself go with considerable effect. The earlier of the two books contains comparatively few characters, and those of modest social position. Rachel herself is delightful and gives to the book, despite its obvious weaknesses of construction, a freshness and charm that is very pleasing. Mrs. Prime and her horrible clerical admirer are frankly caricature, but that they should be so is not unnatural, seeing that they represent the very puritanism that the book is intended to attack.

In Miss Mackenzie we are given the story of a spinster of thirty-five, to whom unexpectedly a small fortune is bequeathed. She becomes immediately the quarry of fortune hunters—shabby social, religious, and commercial. Some of the best scenes in the story are staged in Littlebath, where Miss Todd and Miss Baker (who help to retrieve The Bertrams from disaster) make welcome reappearance. As satire the novel is more dexterous than Rachel Ray, but it lacks the attraction of a real Trollope heroine, and throughout has a faint tinge of the sordid. It is interesting to note on page 242 of the second volume a mention of Lady Glencora Palliser, whom Trollope had 'presented' in Can you Forgive Her?

Not until 1875 did Trollope publish another definitely satirical novel. When he did so, the event marked an important stage in his evolution as a novelist. Critics had begun to grumble at comedies of manners, which spoke of the suavity of yesterday rather than of the competitive hustle of to-day. England was moving step by step along the road to commercialism. Trollope, with his county and clerical families, his political aristocrats and comic tuft-hunters, was shrugged aside as out of date. Such treatment was intolerable, and, with a gesture half impatient, half appealing, he sent out into the world The Way We Live Now. This long and crowded novel—perhaps, with the exception of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the most abundant of all his books—presents, in the person of Mr. Melmotte, the financial magnate of alien origin proper to a truly modern story of English life. Whether the cavillers, whose complaints spurred Trollope to so violent an effort, admitted, after reading The Way We Live Now, that the old dog could in truth out-modern the best of them, history does not relate; but undeniably this book, in which he asserted his vitality and showed that in the matter of satiric observation he was well abreast of the times, has no lack of vigour or luxuriant invention.

That Mr. Scarborough's Family (1883) may reasonably be said to conclude the list of Trollope's satirical novels is perhaps disputable. And yet, because its power is mainly ironic, I prefer to mention it here rather than treat of it as a purely social story. A while ago one example was quoted of a first-rate book from Trollope's last period. Mr. Scarborough's Family is another.

An aged and wealthy cynic suddenly (and, as it turns out, with deliberate falsehood) makes public the illegitimacy of his eldest son. With the complications of inheritance, with the changing relations between old Mr. Scarborough and his two sons, of whom the elder is now destitute and the latter coldly triumphant in his unexpected good fortune, is involved an elaborate second plot, centring round the love story of an amiable young man, whose fortunes depend on the favour of a peevish and eccentric uncle. Analysis of a tale so full of happening and character is impossible in a few lines. Sufficient to say that Mr. Scarborough's Family, were it not for the date on its title-page, might be thought to belong to a much earlier period, not only of Trollope, but of fiction as a whole, to a period more lavish than subtle, more genial and full-blooded than detached and sensitive.

With The Three Clerks (1858) opens the chronology of those novels which, although partially satirical, are in the main straightforward stories of English cultivated life. The Three Clerks is one of the few Trollope novels that has been seriously overrated. In its pages Mr. Chaffanbrass, the notorious Old Bailey lawyer, makes his first appearance, but he is infinitely more effective in Orley Farm and in Phineas Finn than at his first entrance on the Trollope stage. In so far as The Three Clerks gives a picture of the Civil Service that the author himself knew, it has documentary value, but as fiction it is formless and flaccid. Its young women are wholly devoid of that freshness and frankness that place Trollope, as a creator of femininity, apart from all other novelists of his generation; its menfolk are either riotous dummies like those in Smedley's novels, or prigs and villains, compounded so slavishly by recipe as to have little meaning beyond that of the conventional types they represent.

Of Orley Farm (1862) it is unnecessary to speak, the novel being one of the two or three outside the Barchester series which are still read to-day. The Belton Estate (1866), on the other hand, badly needs rehabilitation. Henry James, in a review written when quite a young man, concluded a long paragraph of hostile criticism with the words: “The Belton Estate is a stupid book.” One may venture that the obtuseness was not all on one side. Using a cast of four principal and as few subsidiary characters, Trollope fills three good volumes with the matrimonial dilemma of Clara Amedroz, who has to choose between the uncouth, well-to-do farmer to whom passes her thriftless father's estate, and the polished, self-seeking Captain Aylmer—in parlance, though not in fact, also her cousin—who offers her marriage because at the deathbed of his rich aunt and as part condition of becoming her heir he swore to do so. The Belton Estate has, to a greater degree than any other of Trollope's books, that art of concealing art which delights one type of mind, but by another is dismissed as “stupid.” In a sense it is the most difficult to appreciate of all the important novels, and, were an examination in Trollope a thing of practical import, the examining board would be wise to make this book the test question of their paper.

The Claverings (1867) and He Knew He Was Right (1869) are very long books, each of which turns on a theme highly characteristic of the author. Mention has already been made of Julia Brabazon, heroine of the former book, who jilts the nobody she loves for a rich invalid peer. The price she has to pay is counted in full in the pages of The Claverings, which also introduce a number of excellent characters, from Sir Hugh Clavering, hard, savage, and selfish, to Sophie Gordeloup and her scoundrelly brother, who play so desperately for the wealth and person of Lord Ongar's lonely and embittered widow. He Knew He Was Right describes the steady growth in a husband's mind of unjust suspicion of his wife's fidelity. As a crescendo of hysterical mistrust, the book is a fine piece of sustained writing. As a novel, it would be gloomy and distressing but for an admirable and humorous by-plot laid in cathedral Exeter. It would, perhaps, be hypercritical and unappreciative of his adroit handling of incident to blame the author for the very liberal use of coincidence with which he aids the progress of his story.

Of the six social novels that remain, one is first-rate, three are very good second-rate, one is ordinary second-rate and the last frankly bad. Is He Popenjoy? (1878) may rank with The Claverings as a book undeservedly excluded from the upper room of every Trollope-lover's mind. The Dean of Brotherton, son of a jobmaster, father of the heroine and ultimately grandfather of a marquis, is a Trollope dignitary of the first water. His daughter is as eminent in the world of heroines as is her father in that of ecclesiastics. She is gay, loving, whimsical, courageous, and always natural. Her dour husband with his excessive sense of duty and inadequate sense of humour; her aristocratic sisters-in-law, shrouding in ill-nature and good works the emptiness of their lives and purses; the society siren; the society matchmaker; and perhaps above all the ill-tempered, dissolute marquis, on the legitimacy of whose son turns the whole mechanism of the story, are each one of them fictional characters that only a master could create.

Ralph The Heir (1871)—the plot of which was pirated by Charles Reade and dramatized under the title Shilly Shally—contains some good characters and perhaps the best parliamentary election of all those contrived by its author. The troubles and difficulties of the shy, ineffective Sir Thomas Underwood, and the determination of Mr. Neefit, the breeches-maker, to buy up a bankrupt young squire as husband for his daughter would give distinction to any story. Lady Anna (1874) is a delicate elaboration of Trollope's favourite motif—projected or (as in this case) actual misalliance. The American Senator (1877) contains some excellent hunting and much good general observation. Ayala's Angel (1881), like The Belton Estate but less pronouncedly, is a book that must be read to be realized, for it is quiet Trollope and a thing of shades rather than one of definite, contrasted colours.

There remains Marion Fay (1882), once again a tale of misalliance. This is undeniably the worst book that its author ever wrote. Everywhere but here he contrives to keep either his hero or his heroine (and more frequently both) sympathetic, sensible, and convincingly normal; but in Marion Fay he sinks to mawkishness and to a deathbed scene that is frankly inexcusable.

Plenty of novels still remain of this astonishing and untiring writer. They may, however, be somewhat summarily dismissed. The most interesting group is that of the short, single-theme stories which succeeded the publication of The Way We Live Now. It is not unreasonable to attribute to the mood of challenge in which that novel was sent out the noticeable change in the author's method during the years that followed. It is as though he had determined to try his hand at the psychological analysis which was just coming into fashion among novelists. And so we are given in quick succession six little books, each written round a single event or describing the reactions of one individual to a definite set of circumstances. The titles are as follow:

An Eye for An Eye (1879),

Cousin Henry (1879),

Doctor Wortle's School (1881),

The Fixed Period (1882),

Kept in the Dark (1882),

An Old Man's Love (1884).

It so happened that An Eye for An Eye was written before the publication of The Way We Live Now, although not published until some while after. It is, however, clearly the product (if an unconscious one) of the same impulse as gave birth to the other books, and its theme—the struggle in the mind of a young Englishman between pride of family and desire to fulfil a marriage promise to a girl who has become his mistress—is a theme of the type peculiar to these six brief stories and distinctly foreign to Trollope's more bulky and eventful work.

A further group of five stories may roughly be termed Trollope's “oversea” novels. The first three—Nina Balatka (1867), Linda Tressel (1868), and The Golden Lion of Granpere (1872)—were written more or less intentionally to form a distinct trio. They are semi-romantic tales, staged respectively in old Prague, in old Nürnberg, and among the Vosges mountains; pleasant enough, but quite definitely of minor importance. The first two were published anonymously but achieved little success, and were later reissued over the author's name. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) and John Caldigate (1879) are novels of Australia, based on the knowledge of that continent which the author gained when visiting one of his sons who had established himself there. I understand that as pictures of Australian life they are vivid and reliable. Be that as it may, the untutored reader, seeking only for Trollope, will find him abundantly in Harry Heathcote, which is an eventful, almost an adventurous story, and to a very satisfying degree in the longer book that appeared five years later.

Of Trollope's various volumes of short stories nothing need here be said. Of Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1871) there is little that can be said. Of The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson (1870) there is much that had better be left unsaid. One important full-length novel remains, good in itself and at the same time remarkable as the only one of the author's tales in which he arms himself formally as a social crusader.

The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870) is a novel written in defence of the “fallen woman.” It is quaint to read Trollope's solemn and tactful preface, in which he almost apologizes to his public for venturing on such indelicate ground. Fortunately the book is so feeble as propaganda that, but for the preface, one would be unaware that it was written with any special purpose. It can be enjoyed as a good story of village life, with a delightful parson as central figure and the necessary complement of charming Trollope ladies, gruff farmers, lonely landowners, and aggressive Nonconformity.

This novel, like all Trollope's really good work, impresses the reader first and foremost with its Englishry. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that the very greatness of the author himself springs from this same quality. He is intensely English, with the quiet humour, the shy sympathy masquerading as indifference, the delicate sense of kindliness and toleration, the occasional heaviness, the occasional irritability, that mark a man or a book as English. But if to these qualities he owes his place in our proud heritage of literature, to them also he owes the tarrying of due recognition, for they and the natures that possess them are of all qualities and of all natures the most difficult to impress upon the sceptical outsider, seeing that their very beauty and preciousness and power lie in their elusiveness.