Trollope Today

by CHARLES MORGAN

1

THE Autobiography of Trollope has enduring value as an indirect revelation of a lovable man and of the mid-Victorian age in which he lived. It has, too, what may be called a recurrent value as a mirror in which each new school of literary taste may examine its own features. When the book first appeared, the Aesthetic Movement was in the flood of its reforming enthusiasm, and, like other movements in that state, was extremely intolerant of its immediate predecessors. The result was a violent collapse, after Trollope’s death, of a reputation that had already declined during his later years, and a period of contemptuous neglect which even those who do not call themselves Trollopians now recognize as having been unjust.

Since then, time has had its revenge, as it always has upon literary cliques. The aesthetic writers in their turn have been ostracized by the apostles of “starkness” and “social consciousness"; it has been fashionable to speak scornfully of them all, from Walter Pater to George Moore; and even Matthew Arnold’s “Essays in Criticism,”which do not belong to the Aesthetic Movement, have until very lately been treated, because their approach to art was primarily aesthetic, as being irrelevant to modern judgment.

A later group, called the Georgians, among whom Brooke, Flecker, and Nichols were conspicuous, has suffered a like fate. Having flowered in the second decade of the twentieth century, these poets were trodden down in the third and fourth with the same ferocious prejudice as was visited upon Trollope in the eighties and nineties.

To anyone who can praise Shelley without damning Pope or who can acknowledge the virtue of Whitman’s free verse without despising Gray’s “Elegy” as old-fashioned, this traffic of the coteries, so like the shunting of suburban trains in and out of a terminal railway station, may not seem a good cause for hatred or the hanging out of revolutionary flags; but we have to recognize it as one of the ways in which literature works out its destiny by a process of selection, wasteful and clumsy though that process may seem to be, and not complain about the latest folly of the latest enthusiast any more than we complain when our daughters fall in and out of love. They will marry, bear children, and die; the race will continue, the fittest will survive, and the passionate preference of last Tuesday will be forgotten.

So will the extravagant hatred and the equally extravagant exaltation of Trollope be forgotten, and he will quietly endure, or fail to endure, on his merits as a storyteller. Avowed Trollopians will cease to worship and anti-Trollopians to denigrate him. Indeed they are already ceasing. Trollope is no longer a party feud. His reputation is settling down, and a reader of his Autobiography may enjoy it for its own sake and take of its writer a calm, steady view not, perhaps, greatly different from the view that men will take a hundred years hence.

Trollope, in brief, is almost, though not quite, in his niche. He will be mentioned in the textbooks of future generations, and sometimes one or two of his many volumes will be read. The question is: Which will be read and with how much respect or affection? There is reason to believe that the Autobiography may be among its writer’s principal titles to such immortality as is accorded to him.

It was written, like everything else of his, as part of a laborious routine, but, unlike everything else, without a view to immediate publication. In 1875 he went to Australia, finishing Is He Popenjoy? on May 3 at sea. Having reached Australia in early June, he began at once another book, The American Senator, and finished it on September 24 during his return voyage. When he came home, the state of his production was this: The Way We Live Now (2 vols.) had been published in July; The Prime Minister (4 vols.) was about to appear in monthly numbers; and the two books finished at sea, which together would make up six volumes, were in reserve. Even Trollope may not unreasonably have thought that the demands of the press upon him were not urgent.

During that winter the indefatigable man hunted more than ever, buying fresh horses and “always trying to resolve that I would give it up,”and occupied his writing-hours in what one likes to think was almost the recreation of his Autobiography. It occupied him for seven months — a leisurely pace for Trollope — and was finished on April 30, within a week of his sixty-first birthday. Then, as if he had loitered too long, he allowed himself one day off and began another three volumes, The Duke’s Children, on May 2.

2

WHEN his Autobiography was done, Trollope had rather less than seven years to live. He died on December 6, 1882, and the Autobiography appeared in the following year. It was condemned because in it he made no claim to inspiration or genius, acknowledging without shame, and indeed with pride, that he wrote for so many hours a day and counted upon producing so many words an hour. He was extremely interested in the money paid for those words, and in 1879 added to his Autobiography a table showing that his forty-five books had, with “sundries,”earned for him £68,939-17-6. It was a great sum even then; a modern author, having made allowance for taxation and the increased cost of living, would have to earn roughly half a million pounds in order to enjoy an equivalent purchasing power.¹ But it was not Trollope’s success that, offended his opponents so much as the laborious means by which he had attained it.

When he began a book, he prepared a diary or plan, decided when the book should be finished, and assigned to himself, as a regular task, so many words a week. The lowest assignment was 5000, the highest 28,000, and the average 10,000. A reader, who is unaccustomed to reckon in words, may be assured that this output of imaginative writing is prodigious. Trollope accomplished it while performing steadily his work at the Post Office and pursuing the other activities of his life. The years 1867 and 1868 were, he tells us, his busiest. He had left the Post Office but still had been partly employed by it. He had established the St. Paul’s Magazine, had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, had hunted three days a week, and had written five novels.

No one who has not been a novelist and at the same time carried the burden of another task can fully understand how wonderful was Trollope’s energy or how firm and courageous his mind. His immediate successors, to some of whom irregularity of life and “bohemianism” appeared as a necessary part of genius, loathed him for his virtues and, even more, for that pride in them which they regarded as dull-minded complacency. They assumed that books produced as he produced his could not be works of art. Within the area of the aesthetic creed, the hostile critics of Trollope were justified; he never wrote an aesthetic novel nor, I would venture to add, a profoundly imaginative one.

But his critics were wrong in condemning him on the ground that his approach to life and art was different from theirs. They failed, as every exclusive coterie fails, to observe that the aesthetic truth which they saw, though true enough, was not the whole truth. No theory of art or of life represents the whole truth; but each coterie and sect assumes that ils own theory is a final orthodoxy, and so, in time, is made ridiculous.

Trollope has suffered a strange fate from the sects — being damned in the eighties as commercial and complacent, and as extravagantly belauded some fifty years later as a paragon of perfection. In fact, as a careful reader of his Autobiography or of any of his novels will see, he was neither a thick-skinned dullard nor, in any reasonable critical sense, perfect. He was a hasty and often a clumsy writer. His prose is neither elegant, enchanting, nor evocative. He is poor in fantasy; his imagination, though powerful as a spur to his study of character, is wingless, it never leaves the earth - and that, precisely, is where his strength lies: in the firmness of his feet on earth, in the strength and regularity of their tread; in the sense, which the reader has always, that no tricks are being played on him, that the author is not satirizing what he seems to praise or despising what he depicts as admirable, and that he is trying above all else to do two things: to tell the truth about those aspects of men that interest, him, and, in telling it, to be “readable.”Trollope has many limitations but, within them, he is the least spurious of writers; he never outreaches his own genuine interest; he is sentimental but not highfalutin; he rides his own hunters without pretending that he keeps Pegasus in his stables.

His Autobiography unfailingly gives this impression. Mr. Michael Sadleir, who has done more than anyone else to win back for Trollope the place he deserves, speaks of it as “this queer bleak text-book of the mechanics and economics of novel-writing,”and it is in this queerness and bleakness that Trollope’s strange power of not falsifying anything is made manifest,. His account of his suffering childhood and youth is neither self-pitying nor a deliberately brave avoidance of self-pity. His account of his success is equally candid, being given in terms of those things which genuinely pleased him: money, comfort, the pleasant sense of being someone, the joy he had in his popularity at the Garrick Club, above all his satisfaction in working hard and competently.

The truth seems to be that though, in his early years, Trollope was without self-confidence, he gained it as the years passed. In this gain, and in the visible and tangible evidence of it, he was happy — or as happy as an inwardly diffident man can ever be. He did not count his money because he was a miser, or his words because he confused quality with quantity. He counted both because he had once been afraid of life and because every thousand pounds earned and every day’s work punctually accomplished told him — what he most needed to be told — that he was not a failure. He did not step beyond the limits of what he thought it proper to tell, and these limits were, by Rousseau’s standards, narrow, but a reader would be uncommonly insensitive who, while reading “this queer bleak text-book,” did not grasp that it was abnormally true, and feel himself to be in the presence of a genial, blunt, boisterous man in whom resided always a surprised and alarmed gratitude for whatever good the world yielded him. Trollope was not content to be supinely grateful; he hunted that good seven days a week. To him success was both a reassurance and a sport, and he did not hesitate to say so.

3

THE Trollopian veracity is like no other veracity, It is by no means a simple product of a desire to tell the truth, and even less of a Rousseau-like determination to tell the whole truth ” that was far from Trollope’s polite design. It springs from his limitations as well as from his honesty, from his negative as well as from his positive qualities; it is both deliberate, because he was pugnacious, and involuntary, because he was ingenuous as so many of the solid Victorians were ingenuous; and veracity was, so to speak, squeezed out of him by the conflicting pressures of his nature. The point is that, unlike the veracity sought by the Realists, his was neither cultivated nor exhibitionistic; it was a part of himself, of his extremely restricted self, and therefore a part of his style.

It is to be expected, then, that it should appear in his novels as well as in his Autobiography, but the effect, in the two instances, is different. In spite of an undeniable artificiality of contrivance and, sometimes, a plodding heaviness of treatment, the novels are saved from the charge, to which the work of so many of his contemporaries lies open, of being spurious. Trollope, like the rest, wrote for the then almighty circulating libraries; he conformed as dutifully as any to the negative demands of his public, and when, in The Vicar of Bullhampton, his object was to “excite not only pity but sympathy with a fallen woman,” he did so with extreme caution and, in a preface reprinted in his Autobiography, gave defensive answer to the question “whether a novelist, who professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes, should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as that of Carry Brattle.”

What an opportunity for his enemies in 1883! The single admission that he professed to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes was enough to condemn him as both trivial and hypocritical. And yet Trollope was neither, for the good reason that the limitations imposed by the circulating libraries upon fiction closely corresponded with the limitations imposed upon it by his own taste and by what he would have called “manliness.” The circulating-library readers (when they read fiction, though not always on other occasions) wished to see the world between blinkers and they happened to be the blinkers which suited Trollope. He did not wish to look round them; so little did he wish to look round them that he seems not to have grasped how Thackeray, his adored master, was tormented and quickened by a desire to do so. Nor was he capable of penetrating deeply into what he did see. But, between his blinkers, he observed the conduct, the manners, the pretenses, and the honesties of men and women accurately, and, accepting the good and the bad with a shrug, had no impulse to falsify his report.

So it has happened that he, who was in many respects a romantic novelist, was raised up fifty years after his death as the idol — or, rather, as the pet — of an anti-romantic school of criticism. Meanwhile, the great body of novel-readers began to read him again because they found that, unlike the antiromantics themselves, he was genial, vigorous, readable, and, within the area included by his blinkers, persuasive.

Thus what has been ended his veracity recommended him at the same time, but for different reasons, to the sects and to the general public. Whether it will give immortality to his stories is extremely doubtful. They have none of that intensity which, in a work of art, pierces the heart and mind of readers remote in time and enables them to reimagine it in terms of their own lives. Many have had pleasure in the company of Lily Dale; in Trollope’s day his readers besought him to let her marry Johnny Barnes in the end; but has anyone, because of her, rediscovered his own love or, for the sake of any novel of Trollope’s, reinterpreted his own life? If the answer is “no,” it may go hard with Trollope’s stories as the generations pass. Veracity between blinkers and an absence of spuriousness, though they are qualities which link him with Miss Austen, are rarely enough to keep novels in print.

Nevertheless the same veracity, applied not to fiction but to fact, may well continue to safeguard the life of the Autobiography. The further it recedes in time, the more remarkable it seems to become. There is a pressure within it that is not to be felt in the novels, and it is by no means improbable that a young man today or a hundred or two hundred years hence may lay it down, and stare, and reimagine his own experience in the light of it. Trollope’s plainness was exceedingly odd; he was both pugnacious and accepting. That these seeming contradictions are not mutually exclusive — indeed that no human quality is exclusive, of any other — is one of the truths that each opinionated generation has to learn afresh, and the lesson has never been more straightforwardly taught than in Trollope’s Autobiography.