Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

I

A few months ago I asked a publisher if he had ever thought of venturing on a complete edition of Trollope, and was answered that he had thought of it often, but doubted it would not pay. A few weeks ago I referred this answer to an eminent bookseller, and he praised the publisher’s judgment. I retain my belief that the pair of them are mistaken: for let the name of Trollope be mentioned in any company of novel-lovers, almost to a certainty one or two will kindle, avow a passion for him, and start a chorus of lament that there exists no complete worthy edition of him.

“All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf”—and all Trollope’s would occupy a plaguey long one. Some of them, too, are hasty, baddish novels. None the less, I see that shelf as one of trusted and familiar resort for such a number of my fellows as would fill a respectable subscription-list: and, anyhow, it remains a scandal that certain good works of his—The Eustace Diamonds, for instance—are unprocurable save by advertising for second-hand copies. Mr. Humphrey Milford, of the Oxford University Press, has recently printed The Claverings and The Belton Estate in the World’s Classics, with the Autobiography, which did, as it happened, about as much harm as a perfectly honest book could do to an honest man’s fame. Messrs. Chatto & Windus—whom, as Cicero would say, “I name for the sake of honour,” as publishers who respect their moral contract to keep an author’s books alive while they can—have kept on sale some eight or nine, including The American Senator, The Way We Live Now, and The Golden Lion of Grandpré; and the famous Barsetshire six, of which Messrs. George Bell now offer us a cheap and pleasant reprint,[7] have always been (as they say in Barset) “come-at-able” in some form or another. But while three full editions of Stevenson have been subscribed for since his death in 1894 (the first of them fetching far more than the original price), and his sale in cheaper editions has been high and constant, Trollope, who died in 1882, has, in these forty-odd years, received no gratitude of public recognition at all answerable to his deserts.

[7] Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels: (1) The Warden, (2) Barchester Towers, (3) Dr. Thorne, (4) Framley Parsonage, (5) The Small House at Allington (2 vols.), (6) The Last Chronicle of Barset (2 vols.) 8 vols. 25s. the set. (Bell & Sons.)

It is a curious business in two ways. For the first, the rebirth of Trollope’s fame, with the growing readiness of an admirer to cast away apology and hail a fellow-admirer as a friend “by adoption tried,” has nothing esoteric about it. A passion for Peacock, or for Landor—as a passion for Pindar—you may share with a friend as a half-masonic, half-amorous secret. But there can be no such freemasonry over Trollope, who is as English as a cut off the joint or a volume of Punch. For the second curiosity, I suppose that no man ever wrote himself down at a more delicately ill-chosen time than did Trollope by the publication (posthumous) of his Autobiography in 1883. It was a brave—if unconsciously brave—and candid book. But it fell on a generation of young men fired in literature by Flaubert, in painting (say) by Whistler; on a generation just beginning to be flamboyant over “art for art’s sake,” the mot juste, and the rest. It all seems vain enough at this distance, and the bigots of each successive iron time will always be arraigning their fathers’ harmless art, no doubt to the ultimate advancement of letters. But by young men quite honestly and frenetically devoted to chiselling out English as though (God rest them!) in obedience to a Higher Power, it may be allowed that such a confession as the following would be felt as an irritant:

All those, I think, who have lived as literary men—working daily as literary labourers—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours—or have so tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing at the wall before him till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom—and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself—to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that my 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.

The reader may easily imagine the maddening effect of that upon any ambitious young writer, indolent by habit yet conscientious in his craft, reminiscent of hours spent in gazing at a wall for words with which he wanted to express his ideas. How many times did Plato alter the opening sentence of The Republic? How many times did Gray recast the Elegy?

But time, which should bring the philosophic mind, will lead most critics who follow criticism sincerely to the happy conviction that there are no rules for the operation of genius; a conviction born to save a vast amount of explanation—and whitewash. Literary genius may be devoted, as with Milton; nonchalant, as with Congreve; elaborately draped, as with Tennyson. Catullus or Burns may splash your face and run on; but always the unmistakable god has passed your way. In reading Trollope one’s sense of trafficking with genius arises more and more evidently out of his large sincerity—a sincerity in bulk, so to speak; wherefore, to appraise him, you must read him in bulk, taking the good with the bad, even as you must with Shakespeare. (This comparison is not so foolish as it looks at first sight: since, while no two authors can ever have been more differently gifted, it would be difficult to name a third in competition as typically English.) The very mass of Trollope commands a real respect; its prodigious quantity is felt to be a quality, as one searches in it and finds that—good or bad, better or very much worse—there is not a dishonest inch in the whole. He practised among novelists of genius: Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, the Brontës, George Eliot, Ouida were his contemporaries; he lived through the era of “sensational novels,” Lady Audley’s Secret and the rest; and he wrote, as he confesses, with an eye on the publisher’s cheque. But no success of genius tempted him to do more than admire it from a distance; no success of “sensation” seduced him from his loom of honest tweed. He criticises the gods and Titans of his time. He had personal reasons for loving Thackeray, who gave him his great lift into fame by commissioning him to write the serial novel that opened the Cornhill upon a highly expectant public. Trollope played up nobly to the compliment and the responsibility. Framley Parsonage belongs to his very best: it took the public accurately (and deservedly) between wind and water. Thackeray was grateful for the good and timely service; Trollope for the good and timely opportunity. Yet one suspects no taint of servility when he writes of Thackeray that “among all our novelists his style is the purest, as to my ear it is the most harmonious.” (And so, I hope, say most of us.) Of Dickens he declares with entire simplicity that his “own peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter” forbids him to join in the full chorus of applause. “Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household words—but to my judgment they are not human beings.”

Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules—almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness of his criticism when he acknowledges to himself—as he is compelled in all honesty to do—that with the language, such as it is, the writer has satisfied the great mass of the readers of his country.

To the merits of Disraeli—whom he must take into account as “the present Prime Minister of England,” who “has been so popular as a novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled to speak of him”—he is quite genuinely blind. For the political insight which burns in page after page of Coningsby, as for the seriousness at the core of Sybil, he has no eyes at all. To him, dealing with the honest surface and sub-surface of English country life, with the rooted interest of county families and cathedral closes, all Disraeli’s pictures of high society appear as pomatum and tinsel, false glitter and flash. He had never a guess that this flash and glitter (false as they so often were) played over depths his own comfortable philosophy never divined. He just found it false and denounced it. Upon Wilkie Collins and the art that constructed The Woman in White and The Moonstone he could only comment that “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.”

Again, honest though he was, he accepted and used false tricks and conventions calculated, in the ’eighties and ’nineties, to awake frenzy in any young practitioner who, however incompetent, was trying to learn how a novel should be written. The worst “stage aside” of an old drama was as nothing in comparison with Trollope’s easy-going remarks, dropped anywhere in the story, and anyhow, that “This is a novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. I might just as easily make my heroine do this as do that. Which shall it be?... Well, I am going to make her do that; for if she did this, what would become of my novel?” One can imagine Henry James wincing physically at such a question posed in cold print by an artist; as in a most catholic and charitable paper—written in 1883, when the young dogs were assembling to insult Trollope’s carcase—he reveals himself as wincing over the first sentence in the last chapter of Barchester Towers: “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar plums.” James laments:

These little slaps at credulity ... 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 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 assumed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid storytellers....

Yes; but on further acquaintance with Trollope one discovers that this trick (annoying always) of asking, “Now what shall we make Mrs. Bold do?—accept Mr. Arabin, or reject him?” is no worse than “uncle’s fun,” as I may put it. Uncle is just playing with us, though we wish he wouldn’t. In fact, Trollope never chooses the wrong answer to the infelicitous question. He is wise and unerringly right every time. You will (I think) search his novels in vain for a good man or a good woman untrue to duty as weighed out between heart and conscience.

Another offence in Trollope is his distressing employment of facetious names—“Mr. Quiverful” for a philoprogenitive clergyman, “Dr. Fillgrave” for a family physician, etc. “It would be better,” murmurs Henry James pathetically, “to go back to Bunyan at once.” (Trollope, in fact, goes back farther—to the abominable tradition of Ben Jonson; and it is the less excusable because he could invent perfect names when he tried—Archdeacon Grantly, Johnny Eames, Algernon Crosbie, Mrs. Proudie, the Dales of Allington, the Thornes of Ullathorne, Barchester, Framley—names, families, places fitting like gloves.) And still worse was he advised when he introduced caricature, for which he had small gift, into his stories; “taking off” eminent bishops in the disguise of objectionable small boys, or poking laborious fun at Dickens and Carlyle under the titles of Mr. Sentiment and Dr. Pessimist Anticant. The Warden is in conception, and largely in execution, a beautiful story of an old man’s conscience. It is a short story, too. I know of none that could be more easily shortened to an absolute masterpiece by a pair of scissors.

With Trollope, as with Byron, in these days a critic finds himself at first insensibly forced, as though by shouldering of a crowd, upon apology for the man’s reputation.