Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

by Anthony Trollope

  men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have

  known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who

  would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would

  sometimes fail;--but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of

  the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake.

  And yet he never monopolised the talk, was never a bore. He would

  take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet

  seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier

  novels--the later I have not read--are just like his conversation.

  The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never

  tedious. As to character he can hardly be said to have produced

  it. Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an

  exception.

  Lever's novels will not live long,--even if they may be said to

  be alive now,--because it is so. What was his manner of working I

  do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and

  that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was

  seated with a pen in his hand.

  Charlotte Bronte was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be

  right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of

  one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as

  strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work,

  I should be inclined to put Miss Bronte very high indeed. I know

  no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to

  throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the

  second volume of Jane Eyre. She lived with those characters, and

  felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the

  sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book

  is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that

  Jane Eyre will be read among English novels when many whose names

  are now better known shall have been forgotten. Jane Eyre, and

  Esmond, and Adam Bede will be in the hands of our grandchildren,

  when Pickwick, and Pelham, and Harry Lorrequer are forgotten;

  because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations,

  human in their sympathies, and human in their actions.

  In Vilette, too, and in Shirley, there is to be found human life as

  natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest

  as those told in Jane Eyre. The character of Paul in the former of

  the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love

  with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to

  prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior

  circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.

  There is no writer of the present day who has so much puzzled

  me by his eccentricities, impracticabilities, and capabilities as

  Charles Reade. I look upon him as endowed almost with genius, but

  as one who has not been gifted by nature with ordinary powers of

  reasoning. He can see what is grandly noble and admire it with

  all his heart. He can see, too, what is foully vicious and hate

  it with equal ardour. But in the common affairs of life he cannot

  see what is right or wrong; and as he is altogether unwilling to be

  guided by the opinion of others, he is constantly making mistakes

  in his literary career, and subjecting himself to reproach which he

  hardly deserves. He means to be honest. He means to be especially

  honest,--more honest than other people. He has written a book

  called The Eighth Commandment on behalf of honesty in literary

  transactions,--a wonderful work, which has I believe been read by

  a very few. I never saw a copy except that in my own library, or

  heard of any one who knew the book. Nevertheless it is a volume

  that must have taken very great labour, and have been written,--as

  indeed he declares that it was written,--without the hope of

  pecuniary reward. He makes an appeal to the British Parliament and

  British people on behalf of literary honesty, declaring that should

  he fail--"I shall have to go on blushing for the people I was born

  among." And yet of all the writers of my day he has seemed to me

  to understand literary honesty the least. On one occasion, as he

  tells us in this book, he bought for a certain sum from a French

  author the right of using a plot taken from a play,--which he

  probably might have used without such purchase, and also without

  infringing any international copyright act. The French author not

  unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he

  is "un vrai gentleman." The plot was used by Reade in a novel; and

  a critic discovering the adaptation, made known his discovery to

  the public. Whereupon the novelist became angry, called his critic

  a pseudonymuncle, and defended himself by stating the fact of his

  own purchase. In all this he seems to me to ignore what we all mean

  when we talk of literary plagiarism and literary honesty. The sin

  of which the author is accused is not that of taking another man's

  property, but of passing off as his own creation that which he

  does not himself create. When an author puts his name to a book he

  claims to have written all that there is therein, unless he makes

  direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently there

  arose another similar question, in which Mr. Reade's opinion was

  declared even more plainly, and certainly very much more publicly.

  In a tale which he wrote he inserted a dialogue which he took from

  Swift, and took without any acknowledgment. As might have been

  expected, one of the critics of the day fell foul of him for this

  barefaced plagiarism. The author, however, defended himself, with

  much abuse of the critic, by asserting, that whereas Swift had

  found the jewel he had supplied the setting;--an argument in which

  there was some little wit, and would have been much excellent truth,

  had he given the words as belonging to Swift and not to himself.

  The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves

  be very strange,--and they are strange. It has generally been his

  object to write down some abuse with which he has been particularly

  struck,--the harshness, for instance, with which paupers or lunatics

  are treated, or the wickedness of certain classes,--and he always,

  I think, leaves upon his readers an idea of great earnestness

  of purpose. But he has always left at the same time on my mind so

  strong a conviction that he has not really understood his subject,

  that I have ever found myself taking the part of those whom he has

  accused. So good a heart, and so wrong a head, surely no novelist

  ever before had combined! In storytelling he has occasionally been

  almost great. Among his novels I would especially recommend The

  Cloister and the Hearth. I do not know that in this work, or in any,

  that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written

  some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be

  a pleasure.

  Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak


  with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in

  a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch

  which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural

  that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When

  I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very

  much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct

  his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to

  the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots

  it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary

  dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The

  construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never

  lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be

  warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past

  two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from

  the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-stone. One is

  constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,

  however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties

  overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no

  pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the

  want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect.

  There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel

  that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how

  much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda

  Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost

  as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more

  dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss

  Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human

  nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that

  good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which

  she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be

  proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work,

  and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages.

  Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though

  she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however,

  does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the

  ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women

  do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man

  who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her

  brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who

  would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast.

  There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and

  in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured

  as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to

  nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and

  missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies

  would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and

  when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves

  again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live

  to overcome her fault in this direction.

  There is one other name, without which the list of the best known

  English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete,

  and that is the name of the present Prime Minister of England. Mr.

  Disraeli has written so many novels, and has been so popular as a

  novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled

  to speak of him. He began his career as an author early in life,

  publishing Vivian Grey when he was twenty-three years old. He was

  very young for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the

  excuse that he makes in his own preface, that it is a book written

  by a boy. Dickens was, I think, younger when he wrote his Sketches

  by Boz, and as young when he was writing the Pickwick Papers. It

  was hardly longer ago than the other day when Mr. Disraeli brought

  out Lothair, and between the two there were eight or ten others.

  To me they have all had the same flavour of paint and unreality.

  In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been

  intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand.

  Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his

  object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment

  and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious,

  more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the

  glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been

  a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and

  the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious

  conjurer has generally been his hero,--some youth who, by wonderful

  cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to

  his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties,

  a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors,

  and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general

  accompaniment of paste diamonds. I can understand that Mr. Disraeli

  should by his novels have instigated many a young man and many a

  young woman on their way in life, but I cannot understand that he

  should have instigated any one to good. Vivian Grey has had probably

  as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and has led his followers in

  the same direction.

  Lothair, which is as yet Mr. Disraeli's last work, and, I think,

  undoubtedly his worst, has been defended on a plea somewhat similar

  to that by which he has defended Vivian Grey. As that was written

  when he was too young, so was the other when he was too old,--too

  old for work of that nature, though not too old to be Prime Minister.

  If his mind were so occupied with greater things as to allow him to

  write such a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce

  him to destroy it when written. Here that flavour of hair-oil,

  that flavour of false jewels, that remembrance of tailors, comes

  out stronger than in all the others. Lothair is falser even than

  Vivian Grey, and Lady Corisande, the daughter of the Duchess, more

  inane and unwomanlike than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the

  very bathos of story-telling. I have often lamented, and have as

  often excused to myself, that lack of public judgment which enables

  readers to put up with bad work because it comes from good or from

  lofty hands. I never felt the feeling so strongly, or was so little

  able to excuse it, as when a portion of the reading public received

  Lothair with satisfaction.

  CHAPTER XIV ON CRITICISM

  Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,--but

  it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving

  that certain literary work is good and other literary work is

  bad, in accordance with rules which the critic is able to define.

  English criticism at present rarely even pretends to go so far as

  this. It attempts, in the first place, to tell the public whether
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  a book be or be not worth public attention; and, in the second

  place, so to describe the purport of the work as to enable those

  who have not time or inclination for reading it to feel that by a

  short cut they can become acquainted with its contents. Both these

  objects, if fairly well carried out, are salutary. Though the

  critic may not be a profound judge himself; though not unfrequently

  he be a young man making his first literary attempts, with tastes

  and judgment still unfixed, yet he probably has a conscience in the

  matter, and would not have been selected for that work had he not

  shown some aptitude for it. Though he may be not the best possible

  guide to the undiscerning, he will be better than no guide at all.

  Real substantial criticism must, from its nature, be costly, and

  that which the public wants should at any rate be cheap. Advice is

  given to many thousands, which, though it may not be the best advice

  possible, is better than no advice at all. Then that description

  of the work criticised, that compressing of the much into very

  little,--which is the work of many modern critics or reviewers,--does

  enable many to know something of what is being said, who without

  it would know nothing.

  I do not think it is incumbent on me at present to name periodicals

  in which this work is well done, and to make complaints of others

  by which it is scamped. I should give offence, and might probably

  be unjust. But I think I may certainly say that as some of these

  periodicals are certainly entitled to great praise for the manner

  in which the work is done generally, so are others open to very

  severe censure,--and that the praise and that the censure are

  chiefly due on behalf of one virtue and its opposite vice. It is

  not critical ability that we have a right to demand, or its absence

  that we are bound to deplore. Critical ability for the price we

  pay is not attainable. It is a faculty not peculiar to Englishmen,

  and when displayed is very frequently not appreciated. But that

  critics should be honest we have a right to demand, and critical

  dishonesty we are bound to expose. If the writer will tell us what

  he thinks, though his thoughts be absolutely vague and useless,

  we can forgive him; but when he tells us what he does not think,

  actuated either by friendship or by animosity, then there should