II
I do not wish to make a third with Pontius Pilate and Mr. Chadband in raising the question, “What is Truth?” but merely to suggest here that, as soon as ever you raise it over poetry or over prose fiction, it becomes—as Aristotle did not miss to discover—highly philosophical and ticklish. To begin at plumb bottom with your mere matter-of-fact man, you will be asked to explain how in the world there can be “truth” in “fiction,” the two being opponent and mutually exclusive terms; and such a man will tell you that larkspurs don’t listen, lilies don’t whisper, and no spray blossoms with pleasure because a bird has clung to it; wherefore, what is the use of pretending any such lies? Ascending a little higher in the scale of creation, we come to another bottom, a false bottom, a Bully Bottom, who enjoys make-believe, but feels it will never do “to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among ladies.” Still ascending past much timber, we emerge on the decks of argosies—
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
portlily negligent of all this bottom-business on which they ride, carrying piled canvas over the foam of perilous seas. In short, the man who hasn’t it in his soul that there is a truth of emotion and a truth of imagination just as solid for a keelson as any truth of fact, merely does not know what literature is about. As Heine once said of a fat opponent, “it is easier for a camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for that fellow to pass through the eye of a needle.” Now Trollope, if we look at him in one way, and consider him as an entirely honest Bottom, simply saw Micawber as a grotesque creation and Victor Hugo as a writer extravagantly untrue to nature. He merely could not understand what Hugo would be aiming at (say) in Gastibelza or in the divine serenade:
Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!
Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.
Je serai grand et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons ...
Tu seras dame et moi comte.
Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.
He could as little see—and yet who doubts it?—that the creator of Micawber was absolutely honest in closing David Copperfield on the declaration that “no one can ever believe this Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.” What Trollope made of Don Quixote (or of Alice in Wonderland) lies beyond my power to imagine. But the point for us is that as an honest man who lived through the vogue of Poe and Dickens and, in later times, of Ouida (who will surely, soon or late, be recognised for the genius she was), and was all the time, on his own admission, alive as anyone to the market, Trollope kept the noiseless tenor of his way and, resisting temptation this side or that, went on describing life as he saw it.
Thus, and in this easy, humdrum, but pertinacious style, he arrived, much as he often arrived at the death of a fox. He was a great fox-hunter; lumbering in the saddle, heavy, short-sighted, always unaware of what might happen on t’other side of the next fence—“few have explored more closely than I have done the depth and breadth and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch.” He knew little of the science of the sport:
Indeed, all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them. My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy and have never ridden expensive horses.
“The cause of my delight in the amusement,” he confesses, “I have never been able to analyze my own satisfaction.” He arose regularly at 5:30 A.M., had his coffee brought him by a groom, had completed his “literary work” before he dressed for breakfast; then on four working days a week he toiled for the General Post Office, and on the other two rode to hounds. In all kinds of spare time—in railway-carriages or crossing to America—he had always a pen in his hand, a pad of paper on his knee, or on a cabin table specially constructed.
As he sets it all down, with parenthetical advice to the literary tyro, it is all as simple, apparently, as a cash account. But don’t you believe it! The man who created the Barsetshire novels lived quite as intimately with his theme as Dickens did in David Copperfield; nay, more intimately. To begin with, his imaginary Barsetshire is as definitely an actual piece of England as Mr. Hardy’s Wessex. Of Framley Parsonage he tells us that
as I wrote it I became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties.... I had it all in my mind—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament and the different hunts that rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.
Here Trollope asserts less than one-half of his true claim. He not only carried all Barsetshire in his brain as a map, with every cross-road, by-lane, and footpath noted—Trollope was great at cross-roads, having as an official reorganised, simplified, and speeded-up the postal service over a great part of rural England—but knew all the country-houses, small or great, of that shire, with their families, pedigrees, intermarriages, political interests, monetary anxieties, the rise and fall of interdependent squires, parsons, tenants; how a mortgage, for example, will influence a character, a bank-book set going a matrimonial intrigue, a transferred bill operate on a man’s sense of honour. You seem to see him moving about the Cathedral Close in “very serviceable suit of black,” or passing the gates and lodge of a grand house in old hunting-pink like a very wise solicitor on a holiday: garrulous, to be sure, but to be trusted with any secret—to be trusted most of all, perhaps, with that secret of a maiden’s love which as yet she hardly dares to avow to herself. Here let us listen to the late Frederic Harrison, who puts it exactly:
The Barsetshire cycle of tales has one remarkable feature; for it is designed[8] on a scheme which is either a delightful success or a tiresome failure. And it is a real success. To fill eight volumes in six distinct tales with the intricate relations of one set of families, all within access to one cathedral city, covering a whole generation in time, and exhibiting the same characters from youth to maturity and age—this is indeed a perilous task.... Balzac and Zola abroad have done this, and with us Scott, Thackeray, Lytton, and Dickens have in some degree tried this plan. But, I think, no English novelist has worked it out on so large a field, with such minute elaboration, and with such entire mastery of the many dilemmas and pitfalls which beset the competitor in this long and intricate course.
[8] I should prefer to say that it grew.—Q.
It is a strange reflection—as one turns the advertisement pages of The Times, or of Country Life, and scans the photographs of innumerable “stately homes” to-day on the market—that Trollope’s fame should be reviving just as the society he depicted would seem to be in process of deracination. I use the word “deracination” because that society—with all its faults, stunted offshoots, gnarled prejudices, mossed growth of convention, parasitic ivies—was a tree of ancestry rooted in the countryside, not to be extracted save by wrenching of fibres and with bleeding of infinite homely ties. To some extent, no doubt, this sorrowful dislocation must follow all long wars. A hundred years ago Cobbett rode our land and noted how its true gentry, as a reward for their very sacrifices during the Napoleonic struggle, were being dispossessed by bankers and “loan-mongers.” So, to-day, are decent families—who, while “thinking too much of themselves,” thought much for their neighbours—being uprooted and exiled, and taking into lodgings a few portraits, some medals, and the last framed piece of vellum conferring posthumously a D.S.O. These times, at any rate, do not “strike monied worldlings with dismay.” On the contrary, the war-profiteer and the week-ender with his golf-clubs are smothering the poor last of the society that Trollope knew; and in time, no doubt, their sons will go to Eton and Winchester, learn in holidays the old English love of field and stream and sea, and so prepare themselves in a generation or two to cast off life at earliest call simply because this England, to which they have succeeded, has come to be, in their turn, their country. Thus it will go on again (please heaven) as the father’s hair wears off the grandson’s hoof.
The fortunes and misfortunes of Trollope’s comfortable England have always this element of the universal, that they are not brought about by any devastating external calamity, but always by process of inward rectitude or inward folly, reasonably operating on the ordinary business of life. In this business he can win and keep our affection for an entirely good man—for Mr. Harding, for Doctor Thorne. In all his treatment of women, even of the jeune fille of the Victorian Age, this lumbering, myopic rider-to-hounds always (as they say) “has hands”—and to “have hands” is a gift of God. He was, as Henry James noted, “by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of coarseness,” but it is forgotten on the instant he touches a woman’s pulse. Over that, to interpret it, he never bends but delicately. No one challenges his portraits of the maturer ladies. Mrs. Proudie is a masterpiece, of course, heroically consistent to the moment of her death—nay, living afterwards consistently in her husband’s qualified regrets (can anything be truer than the tragedy told with complete restraint in chapters 66 and 67 of The Last Chronicle?). Lady Lufton’s portrait, while less majestic, seems to me equally flawless, equably flawless. Trollope’s women can all show claws on occasion; can all summon “that sort of ill-nature which is not uncommon when one woman speaks of another”; and the most, even of his maidens, betray sooner or later some glance of that malice upon the priestly calling, or rather upon its pretensions, which Trollope made them share with him:
“Ah! yes: but Lady Lufton is not a clergyman, Miss Robarts.”
It was on Lucy’s tongue to say that her ladyship was pretty nearly as bad, but she stopped herself.
Difference of time and convention and pruderies allowed for, Trollope will give you in a page or so of discourse between two Victorian maidens—the whole of it delicately understood, chivalrously handled, tenderly yet firmly revealed—the secret as no novelist has quite revealed it before or since. At any moment one may be surprised by a sudden Jane Austen touch; and this will come with the more startling surprise being dropped by a plain, presumably blunt, man. For Trollope adds to his strain of coarseness, already mentioned, a strain—or at least an intimate understanding—of cheapness. His gentle breeding and his upbringing (poverty-stricken though it had been) ever checked him on the threshold of the holies. But he had tholed too many years in the G.P.O. to have missed intimate acquaintance with
The noisy chaff
And ill-bred laugh
Of clerks on omnibuses.
Those who understand this will understand why he could not bring himself to mate his “dear Lily Dale” with that faithful, most helpful, little bounder Johnny Eames. He knew his Johnny Eames too well to introduce him upon the Cathedral Close of Barchester, though he could successfully dare to introduce the Stanhope family. He walks among rogues, too, and wastrels, with a Mr. Sowerby or a Bertie Stanhope, as sympathetically as among bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons. His picture of Sowerby and the ruin he has brought on an ancient family, all through his own sins is no less and no more truthful than his picture of Mrs. Proudie in altercation with Mr. Slope; while they both are inferior in imaginative power to the scene of Mr. Crawley’s call on the Bishop. In the invention of Crawley, in his perfect handling of that strong and insane mind, I protest that I am astonished almost as though he had suddenly shown himself capable of inventing a King Lear. In this Trollope, with whom one has been jogging along under a slowly growing conviction that he is by miles a greater artist than he knows or has ever been reckoned, there explodes this character—and out of the kindliest intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in a fright and to a sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s originality or taken the great measure of his power.