by Hugh Walpole
It is the merest truth to say that most of these volumes are now quite dead and no resurrection for them is to be expected.
Of the books of travel the work on South Africa is still a lively and amusing narrative. It is apparently more than that, for so great a South African authority as Sarah Gertrude Millin has this to say of it at the beginning of her book, The South Africans:
When Anthony Trollope came to South Africa in the year 1877, he went through it — its provinces and its problems — with his characteristic swift and imperturbable thoroughness. He dined with governors, slept in Boer farm houses, inspected mission schools, chatted with Kaffirs, with Hottentots, with poor whites, with Dutchmen, with Englishmen. He bought a cart and a team of horses and travelled across land as yet untracked by railways. He entered a Transvaal recently annexed by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, his eight Civil Servants and twenty-five policemen. He chronicled, as he went on his way, a new revolt by Kreli and his Galekas.
He realised the importance of the diamond fields, but barely foresaw the consequences of the gold fields. He stood, that is, at the very point in history when the old Africa ended and the new Africa began. He looked at what was shown him and listened to what was told him and said: “I shall write my book and not yours.” He built up, as day by day he discharged on paper his clear and detailed impressions, as sane and wise a book on South Africa as has ever been written, a book which, despite some mistakes, has still for our own time its meaning.
These words deserve quotation in full partly because they would please so greatly the man about whom they were written and partly because they give so charming a picture of his vigour, industry, honesty, and bustling vitality.
“I shall write my book and not yours.” We can hear him saying it not only of this book but of all the others, and most especially of the Autobiography. The other travel books are frankly failures. His American book is interesting in many ways but too hastily written, and in the Australian and West Indies volumes he seems to have fallen between two stools; in the effort to record impressions that should have lasting value he has lost the vivacity and picturesqueness of the momentary passing traveller.
That is not to say that good things are not to be found — there are good things in every work published under Trollope’s name, even in Lady Anna and Marion Fay, but in their final impression these books are dead.
The Commentaries of Caesar was an odd attempt for him to make, and it was not a success, but it has the unusual charm clinging to it that he gave the proceeds from it as a present to his publisher. How often, before or since, has such a gift been made? We know, alas, of no other instance.
Generosity was not in this case happily rewarded. Blackwood was grateful; for the rest there were sneers or silence, and in one case his gift to a friend was acknowledged in these unkind words: “Thanks for your comic Caesar.”
The Lives of Cicero and of Palmerston were also unsuccessful. Trollope in both cases was adventuring into a country where he was not, and could not possibly be, king. He had not the gifts necessary for such tasks, as he himself very honestly recognised. The Sketches, whether of Hunting or Travelling or Clerics, are good journalistic sketches and are still readable. The Hunting volume is the best of them, but there is nothing here that compares with the splendid hunting to be found in Framley Parsonage or Phineas Redux or Ayala’s Angel, or The Eustace Diamonds. In the same way the Clergymen of the Church of England are poor lifeless dummies compared with Mr. Harding, Archdeacon Grantley, and Mr. Crawley.
With the exception of the immortal Autobiography, none of these non-fiction volumes deserve extended comment save, possibly, the Thackeray.
This too was a failure, but it merits, nevertheless, attention from any lover of Trollope. It had the misfortune, on its publication, to irritate seriously Thackeray’s family, and one sees, on re-reading it, why it should do so. Trollope, in writing about his adored friend, had both his sentiment and his honesty to wrestle with. There was the additional difficulty that Thackeray had made it known that he wished no life to be written of him.
Trollope loved his friend so deeply that one can feel the throb of his affection in every page of this book, but at the same time he would tell no lies, but would write what seemed to him to be the truth. He knew Thackeray only in his later years, with the result that he leaves a rather unfortunate portrait of a man bowed down with pain and sickness and loneliness, someone a little acid from melancholy although loyal and charming to his close friends. Trollope, too, criticises his friend on many grounds, and das but grudging tribute to pay him as a lecturer and editor.
Moreover, Trollope, as he shows in the Autobiography, was no aesthetic critic of letters. He knew what he liked and what he did not like and was not afraid to speak out, but his reasons were merely personal and moral.
Of his simple, honest moral code there is a great deal in these Thackeray pages, and while it reveals to us much that is interesting about Trollope the man, it tells us nothing at all about Thackeray the artist. Nevertheless, for anyone who cares for Trollope the man this book is revealing and deserves reading.
The novels of this last period of Trollope’s life have an interest quite apart from their own literary merit. The Way We Live Now, Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Dr. Worth’s School, Cousin Henry, An Eye for an Eye, The Land Leaguers, and Kept in the Dark occupy a place of their own, have a value of their own that is distinctive and unique, and their position in the range of Trollope’s work, their strange “apartness” from the character of the novels by which he is best known, the evidence that they offer of possibilities in him never sufficiently extended (signs of this have already been apparent in The Eustace Diamonds, He Knew He was Rights and The Bertrams), gives them an aesthetic importance as yet, I think, recognised by no critic of his work.
But first there is one novel of this later period, free entirely from the dark and gloomy tone of these others, that is possibly the most unjustly neglected of all the Trollope novels — I mean Ayala’s Angel.
There is not, I believe, anywhere extant a single extended criticism of this delightful book. It has for long been out of print and none of the recent excavators who have succeeded in liberating far less worthy novels like Castle Richmond and Miss Mackenzie have apparently given it a thought.
And yet it is one of the most charming of all the long list. It is the lightest and airiest of them all, it has a gaiety and happiness and playfulness that Trollope, gay and happy though he often was, never exceeded. It was published little more than a year before his death; it is among those novels that the pundits have dismissed with a rather scornful pity; it is an old man’s work, and yet what vigour of scene and creation, what vitality of action and dialogue it contains!
It is of course too long and its latter half is, like the latter half of too many of Trollope’s novels, all easily foreseen and, as a procession of events, disconnected, but the easy gaiety of it carries it; Trollope’s hand does not tire. How excellent, too, the original scheme of the two sisters, orphans and penniless, allotted one to a rich relation, the other to a poor one, the pattern changing as the heroines move from world to world. In the development of this he is a little lazy, as he is often tempted to be — he could, we feel, make more in actual plot complication of the variety that his idea offers him — but good though the original idea is, it is really for the incidental things that the story is so noteworthy. It was his last gay novel, the last time that we catch that chuckle of good-natured humour that the earlier books brought us so constantly.
Of characters there are God’s plenty. The whole Tringle family: the rich Sir Timothy, kind, stupid, and bewildered; Lady Tringle, half a snob, half a bully, half a fairy godmother; the desperate wayfaring Tom; the “Ugly Sisters” Gertrude and Augusta; — then the “poor” household, the Dossitts (how excellently felt is the relationship between Aunt Tringle and Aunt Dossett!); the masculine lovers, Hamel the artist and the ruby-haired Colonel Jonathan Stubbs (almost as good as Will Belton and of
the same stock); and Captain Batsby; and then the two sisters themselves, Ayala and Lucy, round whose relationship so much hangs, a relationship that might so easily be tearfully sentimental but is never permitted to be so.
Ayala Dormer is a worthy third in the race for Trollope heroines, taking her place only a little way behind Lucy Robarts and Lady Glencora.
She is exquisitely beautiful, of course, but this time Trollope makes you feel her beauty. She is in no danger of priggishness like Lily Dale, and although, of course, she shares the fate of all Trollope heroines in hesitating between two lovers, she is not too stupid about it. She hesitates because of her dream of perfect masculine beauty united to perfect masculine character, and, the world being what it is, it must naturally take her three volumes before she learns that her “angel” resides only in Paradise.
A delightful quality in her is her aliveness to the world as it is. She understands it all through her native wit and cleverness. But because she understands it she does not therefore condemn it or read its cynical lessons in the modern manner. She can laugh at Tom Tringle and like him too. She is honest in her pleasure at the riches and gaiety that Aunt Emmeline offers her, she is honest in her detection of Aunt Dosse’s narrowness and ignorance, but she takes all these things as she finds them, getting fun out of everything and grudging no one any fun that is not for her.
She dances through the three long volumes, the most natural Cinderella in the world; her only real resentment is against Augusta Traffic, who deserves all her resentment. The other girls are almost as good. Gertrude Tringle’s letter to her mother announcing her elopement to Captain Batsby is a little masterpiece.
After a bald statement of fact the letter is as follows:
We mean to be married at Ostend, and then will come back as soon as you and papa say that you will receive us. In the meantime I wish you would send some of my clothes after me. Of course I had to come away with very little luggage, because I was obliged to have my things mixed up with Ben’s, I did not dare to have my boxes brought down by the servants. Could you send me the green silk in which I went to church the last two Sundays, and my pink gauze and the grey poplin? Please send two or three flannel petticoats, as I could not put them among his things, and as many cuffs and collars as you can cram in. I suppose I can get boots at Ostend, but I should like to have the hat with the little brown feather. There is my silk jacket with the fur trimming, I should like to have that. I suppose I shall have to be married without any regular dress, but I am sure papa will make up my trousseau to me afterwards. I lent a little lace fichu to Augusta; tell her that I should like to have it. Give papa my best love, and Augusta, and poor Tom, and accept the same from your affectionate daughter, — GERTRUDE.
There is no space here to do more than mention the delightful London scenes, streets and clubs and squares, or poor Tom’s fight with the Colonel, or Hamel’s interview with Sir Timothy, or the excellent hunting, or the lovers’ talks in Gobblegoose Wood, or the excitement of the new grey silk frock, or the episode of the diamond necklace — Ayala’s Angel is, after the Barchester novels, one of the first half-dozen best things in the whole Trollope history.
The transition from the happiness of Ayala’s Angel to the sardonic mood of the other group lies through Dr. Wortle’s School. Dr, Worth is still sunny in its atmosphere, but its sarcasm is heavier and angrier than it has ever been in his work before.
It is maintained that Dr. Wortle himself is Trollope. That must be qualified, because although Dr. Wortle is Trollope in so far as he is jolly and generous and pugnacious, honest and plucky, he is an entirely undeveloped character. What he is on the first page that he is on the last. He is given to us always in the flat, never in the round. We know after the first chapter that if anyone in the story is to be defended Dr. Wortle is to do the defending and, at the end of the book, that is exactly what he has done. But although he has been active no one else has been active in return. That is, he has done various things to other people but no one has done anything to him, not even his author. It is true that angry parents have written to him, and his Bishop has gently reproved him, and his wife has had some moments of uneasiness concerning him. All these things should have affected, not Dr. Wortle — he is too set to be radically altered — but our knowledge of Dr. Wortle. We know him no better on the last page than we did at the end of the first twenty.
Trollope has once again been lazy, and to see how really lazy he has been we can suggest as a fitting parallel that earlier book, The Warden. The two novels are in many ways similar. In each the central figure is sympathetic, obstinate, and with a good deal of Trollope in his composition; in each it is a question as to whether an official post should be surrendered because of the world’s gossip, and in each the daughter of the criticised official provides the love story. But a comparison of Mr. Harding with Dr. Wortle at once offers the difference. Mr. Harding is seen in the round, not only because, moving as he does through the whole Barchester sequence, we are able to watch him at considerable length, but also because Trollope is not content in his case to be satisfied with the first glimpse of him; his energy here is greater and drives him forward to much deeper investigations. It is possible that an author may have his characters in the flat rather than in the round because of his tempestuous energy. This is always the case with Smollett and often with Dickens, but when it happens with Trollope, whose whole genius lies in just this ability to see his people “rounded” it means that he is tired and lazy.
Nevertheless, Dr. Wortle is one of the real figures in the Trollope gallery and no study of Trollope is complete without him. Moreover, if he is taken with Will Belton, he gives a real portrait of the mature Anthony, just as The Three Clerks and Johnny Eames introduce us to the immature.
Dr. Worth’s School may have been too easily written, but it avoids completely one of its author’s notorious weaknesses — it is never unduly prolonged and has not a moment’s dullness, nor does it contain any triangle love affairs. Its villain, too, is quite admirable. Robert Lefroy, from the moment of his first dramatic appearance until his final fruitless attempt at blackmail, is always genial in character. Nothing in Trollope is better than this geniality of his villains, and many a modern novelist might learn a useful lesson here. So soon as a Trollopian villain is not genial, it means that he has gone beyond his author’s sympathy and he becomes at once a caricature. Lefroy is astonishingly real in quite transpontine conditions, and the American chapters are admirably convincing. His final notion about the cousin is an excellent little surprise for the nervous reader, and we congratulate Mr. Peacocke on his ruthless treatment of it. Mr. Peacocke, although colourless, is thoroughly determined and deserves his reward.
There is a further comparison to be made between this book and The Warden which is instructive. The satire in Dr. Worth, although it is never ill-tempered, is serious; the satire in The Warden, with its Dr. Anticant and the three sons of the archdeacon who so closely resemble three well-known divines, is the light-hearted gambolling of a schoolboy. The satire of Dr. Worthy both social and ecclesiastical, is slight and undeveloped, but it is restive and rebellious. The question round which the Doctor’s position turns is one that, twenty years earlier, Trollope would have debated very hotly.
He would not only himself have been greatly disturbed at the thought of a man living with a woman to whom he was not married — however legitimate the excuse — but he would have seen the justice of all the arguers against it. The sins committed, or rather contemplated, by Glencora Palliser and Laura Kennedy distress him profoundly, and he can only treat the Senora Neroni lightly by turning a blind eye to her possible moral conduct.
He hotly defends himself, not only against his critics but also against himself, for the mere introduction of Carrie Brattle into The Vicar of Bullhampton. But now in his old age he simply cannot any longer be bothered. He says to the world: “I have paid attention to your social hypocrisies long enough. I care as much as you do for goo d conduct and right liv
ing, but I care still more for honest common sense.” He had always cared, of course, for honest common sense, and he had always tilted at the special brand of hypocrisy that seemed to him to go with a certain sort of nonconformity, but he is advancing now to the modern view of greater consideration for the individual case.
In Dr. Wortle there is an astonishing absence of moral repetition — that kind of repetition to which he was especially liable, the reiterated discussion of a case that has, in the reader’s mind, long before settled itself. “These people are right,” says Dr. Wortle-Trollope, “so let’s have no more nonsense.”
It is untrue, of course, to assert that the mood of irony, and even of bitterness, had not been present in him from the very first. It is plainly apparent in the early Irish novels, where it has the form of a natural melancholy and tenderness for lonely and ill-treated souls; it loses itself through much of the work of the middle period, although it is acutely present in The Bertrams (the heroine of that unpleasant work is one of his most serious attempts at the portrayal of bitter character), in He Knew He was Right, and in persons like Mrs. Prime and Mr. Kennedy and Dockwrath; it begins to be manifest in the later political novels (Ferdinand Lopez is curtain-raiser to The Way We Live Now), and in the last years is fully in evidence. There is in this novel something of the weariness of old age, something of disappointment, a little perhaps of ill-health, but Trollope was to the very last, when that fatal stroke silenced him while he was laughing over the pages of Vice Versa, a man who carried life bravely on his back.