by Hugh Walpole
In all the honest downright pages of the Autobiography there is not a word to show that Anthony Trollope ever considered the novel as an Art. He considered it first as an impulse for his own entertainment and happiness; secondly as a means of livelihood; thirdly as his principal proof of self-justification.
Let us make no mistake about the first of these, his delight in his impulse of creation. That same impulse is now for us half his power. Apart altogether from any question of artistic merit, the novelist who writes because he must is well on the way towards compelling us to listen to him. The history of the novel is strewn with the corpses of those who, driven by inward frenzy to tell their story, had nevertheless no story to tell; but at least we feel for them a kind of envious admiration of their impulse.
With Trollope it was not so much that he had a story to tell — indeed any kind of a story would do, the same old story many times repeated — as that he had people to discover, and the first great quality of his charm and power lies just in this, that he is as deeply pleased as we are at the acquaintances and friendships that he is for ever making. We are there with him at the very moment of the first meeting. He does not, as Flaubert does, embalm his friends first, or, as Dickens does, turn them into a ghost, an Aunt Sally, or a Christmas pudding, or, as Balzac does, introduce them to us only after he has, by diligent detective work, discovered all the worst about them — no, we are there at the very moment of the first shake of the hand. We do not know, any more than he does, what is going to come of this.
“Mr. Trollope — Mrs. Proudie,” and we can see Mr. Trollope, a little shy, covering his embarrassment with a good deal of noise, his eyes kindly gleaming behind his spectacles. What Mrs. Proudie thinks of Mr. Trollope we can guess, but we shall never know.
We therefore take our risks and our chances with him, but we have all the fun of stepping along at his side. We can see just why he is pleased, excited, amused, indignant. We can speculate, as he can, whether this meeting is or is not going to take us anywhere.
Whether, however, we allow ourselves to share Trollope’s creative experiences or no — we may be temperamentally unfitted for it — we cannot deny the evidences of his own excitement. He is really, in these initial stages, not thinning of us at all, and so he rouses additionally our curiosity. We know him to be an honest man, not easily deceived, unlikely to be taken in by something of no sort of value, and so, as we watch him thus deeply absorbed, we want to share in his discoveries. Critics are often puzzled by the survival of novels that seem to have no sort of artistic merit; they survive because there still blows through them a little breath of their author’s original excitement. We feel kindly towards him because he was once so genuinely moved.
Not even the most, pedestrian of the Trollope novels — not Lady Anna nor Marion Fay — is altogether without this breath of creative stir.
Secondly, Trollope wrote novels because he made a good living in that way.
Everyone knows now that the publication of the Autobiography after his death killed his contemporary public — it killed it because it shocked it, and it shocked it because, in this book, Trollope said that he wrote novels for money and worked to the tick of the clock.
Now of course we have changed all that. The point is no longer whether you write novels for money, but rather whether you get money for the novels that you write, and, as to the working to the tick of the clock, many novelists to-day have offices in the City and take Saturday afternoon off only.
No, we respect Trollope now for the very sins that once long ago damned him. Whether he might not have written better novels had his methods not been so desperately regular is a question, however, that may still be asked, and must, in a little later, be answered.
‘ Here and now it is sufficient to record that his second impulse was mercenary. He wrote because he liked, it and because he couldn’t help himself, but he wrote also because he wanted money and because he wanted a good deal. And he got what he wanted.
His third impulse was one of self-justification. Here for a moment we must consider the physical man.
The standard presentation of him has become so definite as to be symbolic — almost Titanic in size — vast of shoulder and thigh, astride a horse as Titanic as himself, or bursting into the Garrick Club, bellowing forth some greeting, slapping a friend on the back, involved quickly in some discussion, tempestuous in agreement or argument, hailing friends with a roar and enemies with a frown, hospitable, generous, enthusiastic, limited, bellicose, affectionate; and then behind this eager John Bull the second figure, rising at five-thirty of a morning (roused by the sleepy but ever punctual groom), hurrying to his study, setting his watch before him, then gravely, without a moment’s pause, slipping through the gates of his creation into his well-known country, meeting without surprise or hesitation Lady Glencora or Sowerby or Mr. Slope, striding down the High Street of Barchester or urging his nag down the lanes around Framley, not so much a creative artist as a recording citizen.
And then, behind this figure again, the third, the timid, shy, shrinking self-doubter of the early schooldays, longing for affection but trained to show no feeling, dreading always what the next day will bring, dirty, dishevelled, and above all self-humiliated.
These are the three figures in one that the Trollope fable now presents, and they lead quite naturally to a sentimental contrast.
No story in the world is quite so popular as the Cinderella story. Especially is this true in England, where sentiment runs so deep but demonstration of it is so sternly forbidden. The traditional Trollope is admirably suited to the British taste, being physically so typical a British figure and sentimentally so thorough a British fable. The wretched little, dirty, neglected schoolboy shows grit, independence, and honesty, and climbs, entirely unaided, to a position of splendid fame and financial independence. What is it but the Honest Apprentice all over again?
It would be absurd to pretend that Trollope himself was unaware of the fable — he makes it the text for a number of the pages of the Autobiography.
It was in part because he wished to win his own esteem of himself that he worked with so marvellous an industry, and it was for this same reason that he recorded with so much pleasure in his Autobiography the sums that he received and the hours that he laboured. He never sentimentalised about himself, but he also never lost entirely that sense that his early years drove into him of loneliness, uncertainty, and self-depreciation.
And because he never sentimentalised himself is a very good reason why we should not sentimentalise him either. The reaction from the Victorian scene has undoubtedly in his case been towards a Georgian romanticism. He would not thank us for this. He would acknowledge perhaps that he worked hard because his school years were difficult to forget, but he would not, I think, be especially grateful to one or two recent critics for their sighs over his hardships. He wants no man’s pity.
Because he wrote creatively, commercially, and self-morally, his novels are amateur, commercial, and honest.
When we say that his novels are amateur, we mean that they are not professional. When does a novel become professional? When a novelist has learnt the trick of his trade so thoroughly that that trick has come in between himself and his creative vision. All novels of the first class show victories over professional technique won by creative passion. The technique is there, but the creative passion (which is amateur because it is incalculable and obeys no laws) has not been slain by it.
One of the finest works existing on the novel — Mr. Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction — fails to be finally universal in its applied rules because it does not allow room enough for creative zest and the unbounded powers of creative zest.
Trollope’s creative zest was his finest quality, but because the amateur ignored too completely the powers of the technical professional he was prevented from being a novelist of the first class, of the class of Tolstoi, Fielding, Flaubert, and Balzac.
In scenes like the race-course chapter from Anna Ka
renina, the theatre scene in Madame Bovary, the sword-flashing pages in Far from the Madding Crowd, we are aware of a superb union between creative freedom and technical discipline. The creator, although carried away by his vision, is nevertheless sternly the conscious artist. The intensity of his vision is equalled by the magnificent austerity of his technique.
But Trollope, even in his most intense scenes, has the loose hold of the amateur on his material. His vision is not sufficiently fixed to be sufficiently intense. He sees things with the greatest vividness, but for a moment only. He passes as the scene passes, gaily, lightly, without any apprehension that he has not, perhaps, been artistic enough.
Secondly, his novels are commercial because he often sacrificed their artistic needs for money.
It is not possible for us to be shocked as his contemporaries were by the assertion that authors write for money, but it is at the same time a quite legitimate inquiry whether, in any individual artist’s case, writing for money has damaged the art. In Trollope’s case it quite certainly has done so. To write by the clock is not at all inartistic unless the clock becomes of more importance than the art, as unquestionably in Trollope’s case it did at times become — as for instance when we hear of him finishing a novel ten minutes before the allotted hour and beginning at once another in order that the time should be properly filled.
It is also no artistic crime to permit your novel to be published serially — or at least it is not so until the serial necessities become of more importance than your novel. Had Trollope said: “I have finished this book, writing it without any thought of serial publication. If you wish to publish it serially, but exactly as it is, I have no objection,” then no harm is done. But if Trollope in his desire to retain his serial market pads and lengthens his stories, corrects their incidents so that they do not shock possible readers, moulds his characters by his idea of serial moralities, then his commercial aim is interfering with his artistic aim.
Thirdly, however, the honesty of his work very often saves him. Of all novelists the world has ever known, he is more free than any from one of the curses of the novelist’s psychology, humbug.
There is no dishonesty in him anywhere. If he is writing for money he is writing for money, if he is moral he is moral, if he is pleasing an editor he is pleasing an editor. He cheats himself in nothing, and that is possibly another reason why he is not an artist of the first rank, cheating oneself being at least half of the artist’s obligation to his imagination. Trollope’s imagination never carried him off his feet, and when a magazine wanted such-and-such a story for which it was willing to pay a sufficient amount, he was, for the time being, servant of that magazine.
It is, however, obvious that honesty alone is not enough to keep a book alive — many an honest work has been born at tea-time and died, poor infant, before lights are out. These novels of Trollope’s must have some very great preservative qualities, qualities that have upheld and supported them when many far more pretentious volumes have passed utterly away.
The first of Trollope’s great qualities is his sense of space.
Here I would quote Mr. E. M. Forster in his most interesting book, Aspects of the Novel. Speaking of Tolstoi he says:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot exactly say what struck them. They do not arise from the story, though Tolstoi is quite as interested in what comes next as Scott, and quite as sincere as Bennett. They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns, Auld Reekie, and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoi’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.
It may seem as audacious to compare the art of Trollope with the art of Tolstoi as to place the tidy fields and primrose lanes of England beside the steppes and vast horizons of Russia; but these writers and these countries have certain things in common.
Tolstoi was the conscious artist, and when he prepared the huge canvas of War and Peace it was a deliberate and far-seeing effort. When Trollope adventured through the opening pages of The Warden he did not know where he would find himself next. We can see him fumbling at every page, stumbling into satire as he clothes the Grantley boys in the garments of three famous bishops of the moment or, rather feebly, throws paper darts at Carlyle. So he began, but when we, his readers, look back on the whole panorama of the Barsetshire and political novels we get something far wider, more generous, more enduring than a mere clever evocation of place. We get not only Barchester and its country roads and lanes, but all mid-Victorian England, and then, beyond that again, a realisation of a whole world of human experience and intention. If it is “the sum total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields” which give War and Peace its sonority and amplitude, so it is the sum total of vicarage gardens, High Streets in sunlight, London rooms and corners, cathedral precincts, passages in the House of Commons, drawing-room tea-tables, the bars of public-houses and the sandy floors of country inns, the hedges, ditches, sloping fields of the Hunt driving the fox to his last lair, that give these Barchester novels their great size and quality.
This art of space is exceedingly rare in the artist’s equipment. Jane Austen had great sense of place and little of space; it is one of the greatest gifts of Thomas Hardy, but such opposite writers as Stevenson and Gissing possessed almost nothing of it, Treasure Island and New Grub Street with all their great virtues being contained within the compass of a sea-chest and a lodger’s second-floor back.
Trollope had the gift because everything was of significance to him. It is true that this significance was material and nothing carried him farther than he could see it — nevertheless his vision of material things was infinite and swings us far beyond his immediate characters and narrative.
The value of his sense of space is greatly heightened by his constant preoccupation with average humanity. He is the supreme English novelist in this. That claim has been made for Fielding who, in Tom Jones and Amelia and Parson Adams, had average humanity always in front of him, but his own personality is richer, odder, of greater genius than Trollope’s, and it is humanity plus Fielding that we are given in his novels. Something of the same may be said of Jane Austen, whose human beings, Mr. Collins and Mrs. Norris and Miss Bates, and the others of that great gallery, would all be average humanity if the reader saw them first — but Jane Austen (and we thank heaven for it) is always there before us. Of our own good luck we might have met Mr. Collins and thought him amusingly odd, but neither so odd nor so amusing as Miss Austen shows him to be.
It is one of the most remarkable things about Trollope as a novelist that we get almost nothing of his personality in our contact with his characters. Granted a certain average power of observation, we should, if we lived in Barchester, see Archdeacon Grantley and Lucy Robarts and Mr. Sowerby almost exactly as Trollope sees them. Very rarely he heightens character by the personal intensity that he feels for it. Mr. Slope is thus heightened, so is the Signora, so also is Mrs. Proudie, but even here they are heightened as much by his interest in his narrative as by his interest in character. The Signora and Mr. Slope are not quite average humanity, but they are two of the very few exceptions that prove this general Trollopian rule.
Acute though his observation of detail is, he does not psychologically notice very much more in his characters than the average man would notice. Having, from the first, discovered the almost fanatical personal pride of Mr. Crawley, combining this with his extreme poverty he has at once his motive for an immensely long novel. Almost anyone, meeting Mr. Crawley, must at once have discovered these same two things. Trollope makes no more discoveries about him. Crawley is not revealed to us in ever-deepening successio
n of motives, contrasts, elemental passions as old Karamazov is developed, or the heroine of Smoke, or the beautiful Kate Croy of The Wings of the Dove. These two elemental conditions of Crawley are emphasised for us again and again just as Dickens, having discovered a red nose or a flowery waistcoat or a high collar in a character, hammers that on to the table and leaves it there.
But just because there are so few psychological discoveries are we given a constant sense of rest and contentment. In a Trollope novel we discover as much about the characters as we discover about our fellow human beings. We are not startled or horrified, not plunged, as we so often are in a novel by Balzac or Dostoievsky, or even in a short story by Tchehov, into a kind of outer darkness of loneliness. “Are our fellows like this?” we cry. “Am I like this? Why, then, I have known nothing of life at all.”
But Trollope reassures us, telling us that all is well; we know quite as much of the mystery as he himself does.
It is this reassurance about our common humanity that is responsible for so much of his extraordinarily effective reality.
Within the confines of his own kingdom he is absolutely real. There is no novelist, save Balzac, who gives us so certain a conviction of entering his doors, sitting on his chairs, eating from his tables.
But it is of course not only a reality of material surroundings. We touch the very clothes of his human beings and stand at their elbows as they talk. Open a Trollope novel where you will and you will find dialogue of an astonishing realism, realism of word and accent and casual repetition. Realism, too, it must be confessed, of length and looseness. Opening Barchester Towers quite at hazard, I come upon this: