Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  “Well, Slope,” said the Bishop somewhat impatiently; for, to tell the truth, he was not anxious just at present to have much conversation with Mr. Slope.

  “Your lordship will be sorry to hear that as yet the poor dean has shown no sign of amendment.”

  “Oh — ah — hasn’t he? Poor man! I’m sure I’m very sorry. I suppose Sir Omicron has not arrived yet?”

  “No, not till the 9.15 P.M. train.”

  “I wonder they didn’t have a special. They say Dr. Trefoil is very rich.”

  “Very rich, I believe,” said Mr. Slope. “But the truth is, all the doctors in London can do no good, no other good than to show that every possible care has been taken. Poor Dr. Trefoil is not long for this world, my lord.”

  “I suppose not — I suppose not.”

  “Oh no; indeed, his best friends could not wish that he should outlive such a shock, for his intellects cannot possibly survive it.”

  “Poor man! Poor man!” said the Bishop.

  “It will naturally be a matter of much moment to your lordship who is to succeed him,” said Mr. Slope. “It would be a great thing if you could secure the appointment for some person of your own way of thinking on important points. The party hostile to us are very strong here in Barchester — much too strong.”

  “Yes, yes. If poor Dr. Trefoil is to go, it will be a great thing to get a good man in his place.”

  “It will be everything to your lordship to get a man on whose co-operation you can reckon. Only think what trouble we might have if Dr. Grantley or Dr. Hyandry or any of that way of thinking were to get it.”

  “It is not very probable that Lord — will give it to any of that school; why should he?”

  “No. Not probable; certainly not; but it is possible, great interest will probably be made. If I might venture to advise your lordship, I would suggest that you should discuss the matter with his grace next week. I have no doubt that your wishes, if made known and backed by his grace, would be paramount with Lord — .”

  “Well, I don’t know that; Lord — has always been very kind to me, very kind. But I am unwilling to interfere in such matters unless asked. And indeed, if asked, I don’t know whom, at this moment, I should recommend.”

  How admirable is this dialogue! How revealing of the two characters concerned and how dramatically it forwards the necessities of the narrative!

  That “Poor man” of the Bishop’s, the little comment on the Dean’s wealth displaying a whole world of past surmises, social curiosities and possibly, via Mrs. Proudie, social jealousies! And how completely revealing are Mr. Slope’s words, his mixture of sycophancy, cunning, self-ambition, his knowledge of his Bishop, the eagerness of his own plans, so that we can almost hear the agitated beating of his heart, his impertinence and, at the same time, his cowardice — all these things are here.

  But the naturalness of this dialogue and of a thousand others like it contains more than a revelation of character and an adroit furtherance of narrative. Trollope caught a certain natural rhythm of human speech and has never been excelled in this, save possibly by Henry James in his earlier novels.

  In the dialogue of the very greatest novelists there is often a suggestion that something has been arranged for our benefit (it is indeed the deliberate intention of the modern novelist that dialogue should be so adroitly arranged as to appear to have no arrangement), but the characters in Trollope talk as though their conversation has been reported for us in shorthand and yet at the same time the dialogue does forward the story and does reveal the characters.

  It is also true that, in the later novels at least, this trick of natural dialogue was so easy to Trollope that he seriously betrayed his gift and tumbled into garrulity.

  His further reality of surroundings is secured in the same way. He does not appear to be arranging the scenery for us. His country houses, for instance (and no one has ever given us, stone for stone and brick for brick, more real country houses), are introduced to us exactly as they are. They do not glow with the poetic light that novelists from Richardson to Henry James and Virginia Woolf have shone upon them, nor have they that bare sort of auctioneer’s reality that the buildings in George Gissing and Arnold Bennett display. Trollope says about them the things that we (again allowing for his heightened genius of observation) might say were we on a country walk or paying an afternoon call. In the political novels indeed it is noticeable that he makes the stones and carpets of the House of Commons more real and actual than the events that occur among them.

  He loves especially the low taprooms and minor lodging-houses of his own contemporary London. We are especially glad to have them because we can see exactly what they were like without the colour of Dickens’s transmuting genius. Were we back in the London of fifty years ago, it is the reality of Trollope that we would recognise, the fantasy of Dickens that we would sigh for.

  His reality indeed is saved from being journalistic because of his excitement as creator, but it is often only just saved. When he is not excited (and there are such occasions), but is padding for the benefit of his serial, we might be seeing his fields and streets through the eyes of a contemporary newspaper, but our reward for some dreary passages is our ultimate conviction of his truth. He never betrays us, however pedestrian his novel may be, by deliberately falsifying his vision.

  It is true, of course (as indeed of every artist it is true), that he has, very seriously, the defects of his qualities.

  That sense of space is a dangerous virtue for a novelist, and Tolstoi himself by no means escapes the charge of securing it sometimes by looseness and casual methods of attack. Trollope’s looseness is one of his gravest sins. It comes not only from the necessity of serial publications, but also from his own casual attitude as artist, which is again part of his early Victorian tradition.

  He has all the Victorian temptation to address the friendly reader, and horrible the consequences sometimes are. Henry James in his essay on “Trollope” marks this for the crime that it is once and for all.

  These little slaps at credulity [he says] are very discouraging, but they are even more inexplicable, for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged from the point of view of that rather vague consideration of form which is the only canon we have a right to impose upon Trollope.

  It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as a historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic, he must relate events that are supposed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid story-tellers; we need only mention (to select a single instance) the magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him as Garrick or John Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the footlights. Therefore, when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention.

  These are brave and true words. Trollope’s looseness here is all in the wicked tradition of Fielding and Scott, who gave the novel a chuck under the chin and thought that they were doing her a favour. It comes also from a sort of deprecatory submission to the overconsidered reader— “If you don’t like this, dear reader”, one can hear Trollope only too often saying, “then I have, I fear, almost no justification at all”.

  Another bad habit, part also of his looseness of form, is his desperate affection for punning surnames — Mr. Neversay Die, Mr. Sentiment, Mr. Stickatit, and so on. Henry James on this, too, says the final word:

  There is a person mentioned in The Warden under the name of Mr. Quiverful — a poor clergyman, with a dozen children, who holds the living of Puddingdale. This name is a humorous allusion to his
overflowing nursery, and it matters little so long as he is not brought to the front. But in Barchester Towers, which carries on the history of Hiram’s Hospital, Mr. Quiverful becomes, as a candidate for Mr. Harding’s vacant place, an important element, and the reader is made proportionately unhappy by the primitive character of this satiric note. A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen children (which is the number attained in Barchester Towers) is too difficult to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children, but we cannot manage the combination.

  Here again Trollope is simply unable to regard the novel seriously enough. Why should he not have his little joke if it so pleases him? Better men than he have enjoyed it. That he is altogether too good for his little joke he is too modest to perceive.

  His remarkable gift, too, of presenting average humanity without either caricature or poetic licence has its disadvantages. One can have almost too much at times of average humanity, and there are moments in the middle of almost any long Trollope novel when we long for the sudden appearance of a leprechaun, a satyr, or a water nymph.

  He succumbs more than any other novelist of his class to the dangers of monotony and repetition.

  It has been noticed already that one plot — the distresses and manœuvres of one girl and two men or one man and two girls — serves him a great many times too often. One wonders indeed that he has the gay impertinence so shamelessly to serve it up again and again. It happens, too, that it is a plot which, because of the restrictions of Victorian morality, he is unable to treat thoroughly. His heroine in love with a rogue must appear again and again an addle-pated fool, because the real physical fascination that love has for her must be almost completely unanalysed. Lily Dale calls her Crosbie an Apollo, is embraced by him, and writes him one or two very eloquent letters, but her temperament can be, because of contemporary pruderies, only half revealed to us, and so we, before the end, feel ourselves exceedingly impatient with her dallying moods.

  We are tantalised, too, because we realise that Trollope understood very thoroughly the psychology of physical love. We may be thankful for his reticences (they are responsible for a great deal of his charm in these so-unreticent days), but wish that he had not so continually chosen a theme that the conventions of his public forbade him to explore.

  Much too of his monotony and repetition came from his serial necessities and his publication in monthly parts. Thackeray and Dickens, who were more exuberant artists than Trollope, found the publication of their novels in monthly parts a terrible trial, but the real trouble about Trollope was that he never found it a trial at all.

  He went gaily and steadily forward, padding his very exiguous plot with still more exiguous comedy. How fine and tragic a work, for instance, might He Knew He was Right have been had it not been lengthened to such spider-web thinness! How depressing and wearying is the comic element in Can You Forgive Her? how infinitely too long Is He Popenjoy? or The American Senator.

  The easy rhythm of his dialogue tempts him to cover page after page with conversation so casual that it has finally no meaning at all. In many of the later novels his narrative tensity slackens to such a feebleness that when the big scenes do arrive he has lost the power of heightening his tone. In The Wary We Live Now and some of the shorter stories that closed his career he remarkably recovered his early dramatic power, and it is noticeable that the majority of these later books were published neither serially nor in monthly numbers.

  There is also a monotony of moral values, but this is due to his own honest acceptance of all the Victorian moral traditions. There is for him no standing between good conduct and bad. That does not mean that he has not often a tenderness for his sinners, but he has never the slightest doubt but that sinners they are. His heroines are especially dedicated to the same lines of moral conduct. They may wriggle, twist, and turn, but matrimony is waiting inevitably for them at the end of the chapter.

  It comes, however, to this, that, after all is said, first on this side and then on that, the central secret, the key to the pattern on the carpet, remains to be discovered. We may name Trollope a good realistic novelist, say that he was a creator of men and women but no creator of original or arresting ideas, that he had an especial gift for the portrayal of average humanity, that he stands for this or that in his estimate of Victorian things — we may state a thousand facts and yet miss the one quality, that gives him the uniqueness that an artist must have if he is to survive.

  The astonishment that critics feel at the sudden disappearance of some apparently brilliant work, its defeat for immortality by some far more commonplace and ordinary affair, comes precisely from this — that the brilliant work has not proved itself to be unique or has not at its heart certain personal sincerities and genuine emotions that provide the uniqueness of the average human being.

  None of Trollope’s fine qualities — not his minute observation, nor his “Englishness”, nor his humour, nor his gentle satire, nor the breadth and variety of his canvas would have kept him so magnificently alive had it not been for one virtue which runs like a silver thread through all the texture of his work, which makes him our companion and friend with an intimacy that is an intimacy of personality rather than of talent.

  The late Sir Walter Raleigh in one of his Letters has stated the exact character of this quality in Trollope so admirably that he has been often quoted. He shall be quoted again:

  Trollope starts off with ordinary people that bore you in life and in books, and makes an epic of them because he understands affection which the others take for granted or are superior about.

  Henry James summarises his whole estimate of Trollope with this judgement:

  His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the “usual”.

  We may indeed take these two judgements together and find them complementary the one of the other. His appreciation of the usual is precisely his affection for the usual. He has that greatest of all human gifts — love of his fellow human beings without consciousness that he loves them. He loves them as he breathes; he loves them and laughs at them and swears at them and preaches at them just as he loves and laughs and swears and preaches at himself. There are moods and thoughts and mean impulses, lusts and cruelties which he detests in himself just as he detests the Crosbies and the Kennedys in his novel world.

  There are weaknesses and follies in himself of which he is ashamed, but towards which he feels a certain friendliness just as he despises in a friendly manner his Sowerbys and Slopes.

  There is the hobbledehoy in him, a legacy from his youth, so that he is himself John Eames; and there is something of the shy, affectionate, almost sentimental woman in him so that he understands with a beautiful sympathy the loneliness and pride of Lucy Robarts and Grace Crawley. But best of all does he have his being and live his life in sympathy with such men as Will Belton and Dr. Wortle, and they are men, too, who love their fellow human beings without knowing it, without pose, without self-satisfaction, almost without self-analysis.

  Without poetry too, you may say. Yes, Trollope is the Commentator rather than the Poet, the Rationalist rather than the Enthusiast. He has exactly that temper of his own Mid-Victorian England, evenly balanced, commercially ambitious, believing in what he sees and in that alone, or at least resolving that that is all that he will believe.

  And because he lived so exactly in the temper of his own time he has become for us the ideal day-by-day Novelist, the artist of the Memoir, the Diary, the Casual Letter.

  He had, of course, no sort of prevision of the remarkable and brilliant things that the English novel was to do after him.

  As has already been suggested, he showed in his last years certain powers that would have made him not altogether a stranger to the mood of the modern novel. Where he could not have been completely at home is in the necessity for the modern novelist to be poet as well as novelist. It is not the place here to argue whether the modern novel has gained in symbolism what it has lost in matter of fact. Writers
like Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Swinnerton, and others are still with us, supplying us with all the facts that we need. But the novelist as poet — the one great advance that the English novel in the last thirty years has made — implies so many added qualities, so many fresh defects, that another world from the definite actual world of Trollope has to be encountered.

  This at least we can say, that a certain attitude of almost lazy disappointment in and disapproval of life betrayed by the modern novelist would be altogether foreign to Trollope’s view. He knew well how harsh and cruel and ugly life could be, but no experience of his own prevented him from finding life the most inspiriting, man-making, soul-rewarding experience. He savoured it with all the blood in his body from the first years when, neglected in body and despised in soul, he stumped down the muddy lanes to a school that he loathed, to the last years when he knew that his popularity was gone and his race was run.

  His satire sprang from his humorous scorn of his own oddities and failures; of that deeper and more modern irony that implies that life has done the individual a desperate and impertinent injury, an irony that has its source in an affronted egotism, he knew nothing at all.

  That is why he is the rest and refreshment to us that he is. His affections are natural and logical. He restores our own confidence, calls in our own distrust, laughs at our vanity without scorning us, and revives our pride in our own average humanity.

  The Autobiography

  Walpole, 1934

  THE CRYSTAL BOX