by Hugh Walpole
Neither old age nor the consciousness that as novelist he was dropping behind his period dimmed or daunted him in the least; he was the triumphant rider to hounds to the end. Rather this vein in him that gives so much power and interest to the most unjustly neglected novels of his last years was part of his character and his talent. It gathered strength as he grew, and at the end he stands stoutly asserting, “I shall write my book and not yours”.
The book supremely of this mood, one of the most remarkable of all the English novels published between 1860 and 1890, is The Way We Live Now.
This novel, had it been written by anyone else or had it been published anonymously, would never have been allowed to pass out of English fiction, but because it came after a long series of novels by the same hand, and because its author had been for some years before its appearance far too readily “taken for granted” by the critics, its remarkable qualities remained unperceived.
It has, in the first place, astonishing atmosphere. It is, more completely perhaps than any other story of his, a novel of London life. As Ayala’s Angel has all the sunshine and lightness of London, so this has its darkness and brooding sense of danger. Every character in the book is caught into this atmosphere, and even the ridiculous Lady Carbury, who begins so lightly, is lucky at the last to slip out of this tenebrous world into the arms of the faithful Mr. Browne. It is the story of the lives of two families, the Carburys and the Melmottes, and the dominating figure is Melmotte himself. In spite of certain absurdities, Melmotte is a figure of dominating size. When the reader looks back Melmotte appears to him as something bigger than anything he has said or done. It is Trollope’s greatest achievement here that he does stand as a kind of symbolic figure, the only symbolic figure, save possibly Mrs. Proudie, that Trollope ever achieved. In sober fact he is a dirty, bullying, greedy, ignorant charlatan, who tumbles swiftly to absolute ruin; he is an animal, and for once Trollope regards him, until the last, with small pity; but the shadow that he casts is greater than himself, and to ourselves, who can look back now and see what the self-confidence and material prosperity of that period in English development was preluding, he has a prophetical air.
Trollope is more brutal in his drawing of him than at any other time he allowed himself to be. In the scene in which Melmotte ill-treats his daughter there is a power which he has never allowed himself to reveal before, and in all the passages concerning Melmotte’s attempts to wrest her money from the unhappy girl, he is remarkable in an entirely new manner.
All the incidents connected with his decline and fall have this same half-fantastic, half-symbolic colour — the dinner to the Emperor of China, the election, the absurd scenes in the House of Commons, the final crash.
Every side of English life is shown to Succumb, hypocritically, greedily, falsely, to his supposed power — literature, the Church, politics, English country life, finance — and at the last, in the cleverest touch of all, when the wretch is gone, the world, quite blind to its own weaknesses, shrugs its shoulder and goes gaily on.
How he has progressed also in the art of satire since the caricatures of The Warden! Lady Carbury’s letter, on the first page of the book, when she is writing to various editors that they may push her new work on “Criminal Queens”, is as satirically alive to-day as it was forty years ago.
The sketch of Semiramis is at any rate spirited, though I had to twist it about a little to bring her in guilty. Cleopatra, of course, I have taken from Shakespeare. What a wench she was! I could not quite make Julia a queen; but it was impossible to pass over so piquant a character. You will recognise in the two or three ladies of the empire how faithfully I have studied my Gibbon. Poor dear old Belisarius! I have done the best I could with Joanna, but I could not bring myself to care for her. In our days she would simply have gone to Broadmoor. I hope you will not think that I have been too strong in my delineations of Henry VIII. and his sinful but unfortunate Howard. I don’t care a bit about Anne Boleyn. I’m afraid that I have been tempted into too great length about the Italian Catherine, but in truth she has been my favourite. What a woman! What a devil! Pity that a second Dante could not have constructed for her a special hell. How one traces the effect of her training in the life of our Scotch Mary! I trust you will go with me in my view as to the Queen of Scots. Guilty! Guilty always! Adultery, murder, treason, and all the rest of it. But recommended to mercy because she was royal. A queen, bred, born and married, and with such other queens around her, how could she have escaped to be guilty? Marie Antoinette I have not quite acquitted. It would be uninteresting — perhaps untrue. I have accused her lovingly and have kissed when I scourged. I trust the British Public will not be angry because I do not whitewash Caroline, especially as I go along with them altogether in abusing her husband.
Of all the good letters in Trollope, this is one of the best, but it is the only light touch in this book. All the characters, Lady Carbury herself, the wretched Felix, Henrietta Carbury, whose hesitations between Roger Carbury and Paul Montague afford the only trace of the conventional and far too dilatory Trollope in the whole story, Mrs. Hartle, the miserable Madame Melmotte and the unhappy daughter Marie (a remarkably drawn character), John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles, these and many more pass under Melmotte’s shadow.
It is the book in which, for a moment, Trollope seems really to despair of human nature. It gains its stature from that very thing; it has a compelling force of almost savage disgust. How far was this a momentary mood, or was it the result of an impulse towards a new manner and a fresh talent? The smaller novels that cluster, in this period of his work, around it answer possibly that question.
But before turning to these other novels there remains a point of very real interest concerning Melmotte’s creation. He is the first character of Trollope’s who is entirely independent of Trollope’s personality.
This is of course not to say that all the persons in the earlier books — the Mr. Slopes, the Adolphus Crosbies, the Lily Dales, the Pallisers and the rest — are various emanations of hidden characteristics of Trollope. It is not so true that novelists reveal their own personalities in their creations as that they place those creations in an atmosphere peculiar to their own individuality. Becky Sharp is not Thackeray, but she would not exist did not Thackeray see life from his own personal angle. Of ah the greater novelists Tolstoi alone moves like God, flinging creations into a void and leaving them to find their own worlds for themselves. It is frequently the case that a novelist who is most detached in his sympathies, who utters no judgement and allows no personal bias, for that very reason steeps his characters in his own personal atmosphere. This is true of writers as different as Tchehov and Arnold Bennett. But in every novelist’s career the moment arrives when he is sick unto death of this personality, of the few things that he can do, of the fashion in which everything the more he endeavours to change it insists on being the same as before. This is always the moment for the critic to watch, and on the issue of that restlessness frequently depends the final value of the novelist as artist.
It is one of the strangest and most ironical facts in the career of Trollope as artist that the moment of restlessness came at the very end of his career when all the watchers were too sleepy to notice it. Melmotte is the point of departure — a departure that might have led to new glories but, because it came when it did, led almost nowhere at all.
There is nothing more remarkable in the history of Trollope’s genius than that, with a personality finely based on a very few simple things, he created such a various world of people, but every character of his before Melmotte is, so to speak, in his confidence. He hands the wretched Crosbie or the wretched Kennedy with a nod to the reader as though he would say: “These are not men whom I can like, try as I may, but they are men for whom I wish you to have some tenderness.” He is always, whether for good or ill, at the reader’s side. But Melmotte he does not introduce to the reader, Melmotte rather imposes himself not only upon the reader but upon Trollope, and from his fir
st introduction to his last appearance he forces Trollope to impersonality, and so, in creating him, Trollope suddenly discovers a new power of realising creation, from outside rather than from within. He is perhaps not actively aware of what this is going to mean to his art, but we cannot doubt that, had he had time and vigour, he would have passed on from that pleasant personal atmosphere in which he was a sort of genial host at a very mixed garden party to that impersonal world of art where he is used as a medium for the creation of figures greater than he knows.
This is not to say that the one world is of larger size than the other. Who can be sufficiently sure that in the final judgement Valérie Marneffe is greater than Elizabeth Bennett, Raskolnikov than Tom Jones, Jude and Sue than Mr. Micawber and Betsy Trotwood; but it is towards the world of Raskolnikov and Jude that after The Way We Live Now Trollope might have moved.
The shabby end of the dirty adventurer has something of this new impersonal grandeur about it:
The member for Westminster caused no further inconvenience. He remained in his seat for perhaps ten minutes, and then, not with a very steady step, but still with sufficient capacity sufficient for his own guidance, he made his way down to the doors. His exit was watched in silence, and the moment was an anxious one for the Speaker, the clerks, and all who were near him. Had he fallen someone — or rather some two or three — must have picked him up and carried him out. But he did not fall either there or in the lobbies, or on his way down to Palace Yard. Many were looking at him, but none touched him. When he had got through the gates, leaning against the wall he hallooed for his brougham, and the servant who was waiting for him soon took him home to Bruton Street. That was the last which the British Parliament saw of its new member for Westminster.
Melmotte as soon as he reached home got into his sitting-room without difficulty, and called for more brandy and water. Between eleven and twelve he was left there by his servant with a bottle of brandy, three or four bottles of soda-water, and his cigar case. Neither of the ladies of the family came to him, nor did he speak of them. Nor was he so drunk then as to give rise to any suspicion in the mind of the servant. He was habitually left there at night, and the servant as usual went to his bed. But at nine o’clock on the following morning the maidservant found him dead upon the floor. Drunk as he had been — more drunk as he probably became during the night — still he was able to deliver himself from the indignities and penalties to which the law might have subjected him by a dose of prussic acid.
The last scene in the Commons and the death that followed it is not a sporadic moment in another impulse of Trollope’s art — there are, as I have already said, such sporadic moments in The Bertrams and He Knew He Was Right — it is rather a definite step into definitely new country.
The consequences of this step were not, because of the circumstances, very great. They were interesting as prophecies rather than achievements. These prophecies are to be found in Mr. Scarborough’s Family, An Eye for an Eye, Cousin Henry, and the uncompleted Landleaguers.
The most curious and important of these is undoubtedly Mr. Scarborough’s Family. This is Trollope’s most malevolent novel, and it contains Trollope’s most malevolent plot. Mr. Scarborough detests the law of entail. He has therefore performed two marriage ceremonies with his eldest son’s mother, one before the boy’s birth, one after. He can therefore make this son legitimate or illegitimate at will. Because this eldest son is a reckless fellow and is in the hands of the Jews, old Scarborough proclaims him a bastard, then settles secretly his debts, and, when the younger son is becoming something too arrogant over his prospects, produces the first marriage certificate and so restores the eldest son. Then, smiling sardonically, dies.
The book as a whole is amusing, the moneylenders are especially well done, but the malevolence of it all gives it its character. It might almost have been written, in certain of its chapters, by Peacock, and at other times it reminds one of the author of Erewhon. What a curiously humorous sardonic young man Trollope might have been had he been born ten years before he died!
And yet not entirely. There are works of these same last years which show the old Trollope sinking into a sort of ghostly repetition of his worst literary self. To say nothing of the pallid Marion Fay there are little stories like Kept in the Dark and An Old Man’s Love, little stories that depend for their interest on absurd situations as when in Kept in the Dark a lover dismisses his young lady because, before she knew him, she had been engaged for a short period to Somebody else — there’s gentlemanly conduct for you! — and in An Old Man’s Love, when the young lover, his pockets bulging with Kimberley diamonds, returns to England a moment after the young girl has accepted (out of a sense of duty, of course) her elderly Mr. Whittlestaff. Were these the only works of Trollope’s older years, then critics and philosophers would be justified in their ruthless indifference. No, all that world of Trollope’s talent — the world of the Barsetshire lanes, and the hesitating damsel, and the aristocratic country house, and the local vicar ambling on his nag — was dead. Ayala’s Angel was the last lively flavour of it. And out of the ashes Melmotte rose, and with Melmotte strange un-Trollopian things like Cousin Henry and An Eye for an Eye.
It would be running too far to claim success for Cousin Henry. Both his novel and An Eye for an Eye have a curious amateur immature air as though they were the works of some beginner of talent. Cousin Henry tells the story of a weak young man who, finding a will that will disinherit him, tells no one of his discovery and suffers tortures of fear and evil conscience. The plot suffers from the inevitability of its conclusion. We know that the will will be found and Cousin Henry punished. Nor is Henry himself at all interesting. He is not one of the villains like Crosbie with whom Trollope has sympathy — like Lopez and George Vavasour he is one of the black sheep, but he has none of their bluster or braggadocio. He is a “nothing”. But his moods are something. As he sits in the library not daring to move lest someone should enter during his absence and discover the will, he becomes a figure who, like Melmotte, is greater than himself and greater than Trollope’s intention. A whole world of new motives, analyses of passion, subjective thoughts and deeds was about to invade the English novel at this time, and Trollope, even in such a little book as this, seems suddenly to be, without his own intention, in touch with it. He does not yet know how to deal with it; he is fumbling and hesitating, but he is in touch.
He is fumbling and hesitating again in An Eye for an Eye, which is in some respects a rather ludicrous little novel. It has the good old Transpontine theme of the young heir to the peerage who betrays the beautiful maiden and is then afraid to marry her.
There is no very good reason why he should not marry her. He argues a good deal with himself, with Trollope, and with the reader that, having given his oath to his uncle, the noble peer, that he would not marry the beautiful maiden, he’ must keep his word, but none of his audiences are in the least convinced. He is a feeble young idiot, and his beautiful lady-love a tiresome, helpless puppet. It is the heroine’s mother, a fierce and laconic lady, who at last, yielding to an impulse of quite natural impatience, pushes the hero over a cliff. No one can blame her, nor can anyone miss the hero. I am afraid that it is in itself a rather silly story, nor does any character live in it, but again in its moral and spiritual atmosphere it touches this new world that Trollope was on the edge of discovering. It is a moral rather than a physical atmosphere. Mrs. O’Hara is in herself melodramatic and false, but, when the little book is closed, a poetic symbolism hangs over the memory of her that gives it a larger, grander size than many of the more successful, more practical works.
And the long list ends with the unfinished Landleaguers. What a strange, touching rounding off of the whole career is this return, in sickness and old age, to the. Irish novel that so many years before had been begun with so much strength and power. The Landleaguers is a postscript to The Macdermots and the Kellys, and, in the first half at least, no mean postscript either. We are given the
old Ireland that, in all his excursions to Barchester and the House of Commons and Prague and Australia, he has always carried with him. The novel opens with great vigour in its history of the misfortunes of the Jones family, the strange little Catholic boy Florian, the floodings and boycottings and cattle-maimings. It moves with a fine strong sweep until the scene of Florian’s murder; after that it flags and dies away. The scenes of the musical and Jewish world in London are feeble in the extreme, and are witness, as are Kept in the Dark and Marion Fay, that that whole world has died in him for ever. But in the earlier Irish scenes that new poetic tragic realisation of life that has so ironically come to him too late is everywhere to be found. Too late and too early! In those first two Irish novels it was there; in this last group again; and, in between, all the books that won him fame and give him now his position!
His performance, his potentiality. He becomes surely the greater artist when we realise that he was the author not only of Barchester Towers but of The Macdermots and Cousin Henry, and that he was the creator of Melmotte and Mrs. O’Hara as well as of Archdeacon Grantley and Mrs. Proudie.
CHAPTER VII. THE ARTIST
THE first thing to be noticed in the critical consideration of the work of any English Victorian novelist is that, before 1870, in England no one thought of the novel as a work of art.
Fielding wrote about the novel, Jane Austen talked about it, Scott thumped it on the back, Thackeray patronised it, Dickens used it as a vehicle for every kind of fun but had never time to treat it with real consideration, the Brontes adapted it to their poetic longing, George Eliot (at times a superb artist) transformed it into a pulpit; it was not until that thrilling winter of 1870-71 when a young architect in London published his first novel Desperate Remedies, a neglected work called The Adventures of Harry Richmond banged loosely about the Circulating Library shelves, and a youth in Edinburgh, ill-considered by his relatives, sent an essay or two about Penny Whistles to the London magazines, that the English novel thought about getting some new clothes and walking the town as an Artist.