Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

by Anthony Trollope

  was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many

  they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct

  morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men

  and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could

  not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo was

  laid upon novel-reading as a pursuit, which was to the novelist

  a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I

  now complain.

  There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that

  people of an age to read have got too much power into their own

  hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right

  and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country

  parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old

  lawyers and by young students. It has not only come to pass that

  a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that

  the provision so made must now include books which a few years since

  the godly would have thought to be profane. It was this necessity

  which, a few years since, induced the editor of Good Words to apply

  to me for a novel,--which, indeed, when supplied was rejected, but

  which now, probably, owing to further change in the same direction,

  would have been accepted.

  If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide

  as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done

  by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result

  of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which

  appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of

  the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day,--greater

  probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves,--comes

  from these books, which are in the hands of all readers. It is from

  them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they

  are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men

  unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms

  of love,--though I fancy that few young men will think so little

  of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right

  in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times,

  when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently

  assaulted by the ambition to be great; in which riches are the

  easiest road to greatness; when the temptations to which men are

  subjected dull their eyes to the perfected iniquities of others;

  when it is so hard for a man to decide vigorously that the pitch,

  which so many are handling, will defile him if it be touched;--men's

  conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day

  depicted to them as leading to glorious or inglorious results. The

  woman who is described as having obtained all that the world holds

  to be precious, by lavishing her charms and her caresses unworthily

  and heartlessly, will induce other women to do the same with

  theirs,--as will she who is made interesting by exhibitions of

  bold passion teach others to be spuriously passionate. The young

  man who in a novel becomes a hero, perhaps a Member of Parliament,

  and almost a Prime Minister, by trickery, falsehood, and flash

  cleverness, will have many followers, whose attempts to rise in

  the world ought to lie heavily on the conscience of the novelists

  who create fictitious Cagliostros. There are Jack Sheppards other

  than those who break into houses and out of prisons,--Macheaths,

  who deserve the gallows more than Gay's hero.

  Thinking of all this, as a novelist surely must do,--as I certainly

  have done through my whole career,--it becomes to him a matter of

  deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words

  and doings he hopes to interest his readers. It will very frequently

  be the case that he will be tempted to sacrifice something for

  effect, to say a word or two here, or to draw a picture there,

  for which he feels that he has the power, and which when spoken or

  drawn would be alluring. The regions of absolute vice are foul and

  odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and

  the nose, is disgusting. In these he will hardly tread. But there

  are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers

  seem to grow; and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands

  that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit

  that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the

  flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem

  to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing!

  The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And

  he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach

  lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to

  his readers? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to

  be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy

  supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist,

  if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same

  purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics.

  If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and

  vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them,

  then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk

  of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he be or not the

  most foolish of existing mortals.

  I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists

  may boast as a class that has been the general result of our own

  work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty

  that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss

  Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such

  to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George

  Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words,

  with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I

  will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any

  one by search through the works of the six great English novelists

  I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach

  a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their

  pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have

  they not ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say,

  baldly and simply: "Because you lied here, or were heartless there,

  because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home,

  or you Earl Leicester were false through your ambition, or you

  Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall

  be scourged with scourges either in this world or in the next;" but

  it is for him to show, as he carries on his tale, that his Lydia,

  or his Leicester, or his Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation

  of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever,

  beautiful, attractive,--so as to make men love her, and women

  almost envy her,--and let her be made also heartless,
unfeminine,

  and ambitious of evil grandeur, as was Beatrix, what a danger is

  there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it,

  what peril of doing harm! But if at last it have been so handled

  that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say: "Oh! not like

  that;--let me not be like that!" and that every youth shall say:

  "Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom, anything

  rather than that!"--then will not the novelist have preached his

  sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it?

  Very much of a novelist's work must appertain to the intercourse

  between young men and young women. It is admitted that a novel

  can hardly be made interesting or successful without love. Some few

  might be named, but even in those the attempt breaks down, and the

  softness of love is found to be necessary to complete the story.

  Pickwick has been named as an exception to the rule, but even

  in Pickwick there are three or four sets of lovers, whose little

  amatory longings give a softness to the work. I tried it once with

  Miss Mackenzie, but I had to make her fall in love at last. In this

  frequent allusion to the passion which most stirs the imagination

  of the young, there must be danger. Of that the writer of fiction

  is probably well aware. Then the question has to be asked, whether

  the danger may not be so averted that good may be the result,--and

  to be answered.

  respect the necessity of dealing with love is advantageous,--advantageous

  from the very circumstance which has made love necessary to

  all novelists. It is necessary because the passion is one which

  interests or has interested all. Every one feels it, has felt it,

  or expects to feel it,--or else rejects it with an eagerness which

  still perpetuates the interest. If the novelist, therefore, can

  so handle the subject as to do good by his handling, as to teach

  wholesome lessons in regard to love, the good which he does will

  be very wide. If I can teach politicians that they can do their

  business better by truth than by falsehood, I do a great service;

  but it is done to a limited number of persons. But if I can make

  young men and women believe that truth in love will make them

  happy, then, if my writings be popular, I shall have a very large

  class of pupils. No doubt the cause for that fear which did exist

  as to novels arose from an idea that the matter of love would be

  treated in an inflammatory and generally unwholesome manner. "Madam,"

  says Sir Anthony in the play, "a circulating library in a town is

  an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the

  year; and depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of

  handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last." Sir Anthony

  was no doubt right. But he takes it for granted that the longing

  for the fruit is an evil. The novelist who writes of love thinks

  differently, and thinks that the honest love of an honest man is

  a treasure which a good girl may fairly hope to win,--and that if

  she can be taught to wish only for that, she will have been taught

  to entertain only wholesome wishes.

  I can easily believe that a girl should be taught to wish to love

  by reading how Laura Bell loved Pendennis. Pendennis was not in

  truth a very worthy man, nor did he make a very good husband; but

  the girl's love was so beautiful, and the wife's love when she became

  a wife so womanlike, and at the same time so sweet, so unselfish,

  so wifely, so worshipful,--in the sense in which wives are told

  that they ought to worship their husband,--that I cannot believe

  that any girl can be injured, or even not benefited, by reading of

  Laura's love.

  There once used to be many who thought, and probably there still

  are some, even here in England, who think that a girl should hear

  nothing of love till the time come in which she is to be married.

  That, no doubt, was the opinion of Sir Anthony Absolute and of Mrs.

  Malaprop. But I am hardly disposed to believe that the old system

  was more favourable than ours to the purity of manners. Lydia

  Languish, though she was constrained by fear of her aunt to hide

  the book, yet had Peregrine Pickle in her collection. While human

  nature talks of love so forcibly it can hardly serve our turn

  to be silent on the subject. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque

  recurret." There are countries in which it has been in accordance

  with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought

  to marry the man almost out of the nursery--or rather perhaps out

  of the convent--without having enjoyed that freedom of thought

  which the reading of novels and of poetry will certainly produce;

  but I do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to

  be happier than our own.

  Among English novels of the present day, and among English

  novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels

  and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational,

  sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are

  considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic.

  I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed

  to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to

  take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by

  the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development

  of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake,--which mistake arises

  from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time

  realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in

  the highest degree. If a novel fail in either, there is a failure

  in art. Let those readers who believe that they do not like

  sensational scenes in novels think of some of those passages from

  our great novelists which have charmed them most:--of Rebecca in

  the castle with Ivanhoe; of Burley in the cave with Morton; of the

  mad lady tearing the veil of the expectant bride, in Jane Eyre; of

  Lady Castlewood as, in her indignation, she explains to the Duke

  of Hamilton Henry Esmond's right to be present at the marriage of

  his Grace with Beatrix;--may I add of Lady Mason, as she makes her

  confession at the feet of Sir Peregrine Orme? Will any one say that

  the authors of these passages have sinned in being over-sensational? No

  doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth

  in detail, and told as affecting personages without character,--wooden

  blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men

  and women, does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with

  awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in

  themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person,

  are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. And such would-be

  tragic elements of a story may be increased without end, and

  without difficulty. I may tell you of a woman murdered,--murdered

  in the same street with you, in the next house,--that she was a

  wife murdered by her husband,--a bride not yet a week a wife. I may

  add to it for ever.
I may say that the murderer roasted her alive.

  There is no end to it. I may declare that a former wife was treated

  with equal barbarity; and may assert that, as the murderer was led

  away to execution, he declared his only sorrow, his only regret

  to be, that he could not live to treat a third wife after the same

  fashion. There is nothing so easy as the creation and the cumulation

  of fearful incidents after this fashion. If such creation and cumulation

  be the beginning and the end of the novelist's work,--and novels have

  been written which seem to be without other attractions,--nothing

  can be more dull or more useless. But not on that account are we

  averse to tragedy in prose fiction. As in poetry, so in prose, he

  who can deal adequately with tragic elements is a greater artist

  and reaches a higher aim than the writer whose efforts never carry

  him above the mild walks of everyday life. The Bride of Lammermoor

  is a tragedy throughout, in spite of its comic elements. The life

  of Lady Castlewood, of whom I have spoken, is a tragedy. Rochester's

  wretched thraldom to his mad wife, in Jane Eyre, is a tragedy.

  But these stories charm us not simply because they are tragic, but

  because we feel that men and women with flesh and blood, creatures

  with whom we can sympathise, are struggling amidst their woes. It

  all lies in that. No novel is anything, for the purposes either

  of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the

  characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so

  tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears,

  and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be,--truth

  of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and

  women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be

  too sensational.

  I did intend when I meditated that history of English fiction to

  include within its pages some rules for the writing of novels;--or

  I might perhaps say, with more modesty, to offer some advice on

  the art to such tyros in it as might be willing to take advantage

  of the experience of an old hand. But the matter would, I fear,

  be too long for this episode, and I am not sure that I have as yet

  got the rules quite settled in my own mind. I will, however, say

  a few words on one or two points which my own practice has pointed

  out to me.