V
The writer of the group who has consistently gained ground and has come to be generally recognized as a great artist, a force in English fiction both for influence and pleasure-giving power, is Anthony Trollope. He is vital to-day and strengthening his hold upon the readers of fiction. The quiet, cultivated folk in whose good opinion lies the destiny of really worthy literature, are, as a rule, friendly to Trollope; not seldom they are devoted to him. Such people peruse him in an enjoyably ruminative way at their meals, or read him in the neglige of retirement. He is that cosy, enviable thing, a bedside author. He is above all a story-teller for the middle-aged and it is his good fortune to be able to sit and wait for us at that half-way house,—since we all arrive. Of course, to say this is to acknowledge his limitations. He does not appeal strongly to the young, though he never forgets to tell a love story; but he is too placid, matter-of-fact, unromantic for them. But if he do not shake us with lyric passion, he is always interesting and he wears uncommonly well. That his popularity is extending is testified to by new editions and publishers' hullabaloo over his work.
Such a fate is deserved by him, for Trollope is one of the most consummate masters of that commonplace which has become the modern fashion—and fascination. He has a wonderful power in the realism which means getting close to the fact and the average without making them uninteresting. So, naturally, as realism has gained he has gained. No one except Jane Austen has surpassed him in this power of truthful portrayal, and he has the advantage of being practically of our own day. He insisted that fiction should be objective, and refused to intrude himself into the story, showing himself in this respect a better artist than Thackeray, whom he much admired but frankly criticized. He was unwilling to pause and harangue his audience in rotund voice after the manner of Dickens, First among modern novelists, Trollope stands invisible behind his characters, and this, as we have seen, was to become one of the articles of the modern creed of fiction. He affords us that peculiar pleasure which is derived from seeing in a book what we instantly recognize as familiar to us in life. Just why the pleasure, may be left to the psychologists; but it is of indisputable charm, and Trollope possesses it. We may talk wisely and at length of his commonplaceness, lack of spice, philistinism; he can be counted on to amuse us. He lived valiantly up to his own injunction: "Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it is readable." A simple test, this, but a terrible one that has slain its thousands. No nineteenth century maker of stories is safer in the matter of keeping the attention. If the book can be easily laid down, it is always agreeable to take it up again.
Trollope set out in the most systematic way to produce a series of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or land, exactly as the merchant goes to his office, the mechanic to his shop. He wrote with a watch before him, two hundred and fifty words to fifteen minutes. But he had the most unusual faculty of direct, unprejudiced, clear observation; he trained himself to set down what he saw and to remember it. And he also had the constructive ability to shape and carry on his story so as to create the effect of growth, along with an equally valuable power of sympathetic characterization, so that you know and understand his folk. Add to this a style perfectly accordant with the unobtrusive harmony of the picture, and the main elements of Trollope's appeal have been enumerated. Yet has he not been entirely explained. His art—meaning the skilled handling of his material—can hardly be praised too much; it is so easy to underestimate because it is so unshowy. Few had a nicer sense of scale and tone; he gets his effects often because of this harmony of adjustment. For one example, "The Warden" is a relatively short piece of fiction which opens the famous Chronicles of Barset series. Its interest culminates in the going of the Reverend Septimus Harding to London from his quiet country home, in order to prevent a young couple from marrying. The whole situation is tiny, a mere corner flurry. But so admirably has the climax been prepared, so organic is it to all that went before in the way of preparation, that the result is positively thrilling: a wonderful example of the principle of key and relation.
Or again, in that scene which is a favorite with all Trollope's readers, where the arrogant Mrs. Proudie is rebuked by the gaunt Mr. Crawley, the effect of his famous "Peace, woman!" is tremendous only because it is a dash of vivid red in a composition where the general color scheme is low and subdued.
In view of this faculty, it will not do to regard Trollope as a kind of mechanic who began one novel the day he finished another and often carried on two or three at the same time, like a juggler with his balls, with no conception of them as artistic wholes. He says himself that he began a piece of fiction with no full plan. But, with his very obvious skill prodigally proved from his work, we may beg leave to take all such statements in a qualified sense: for the kind of fiction he aimed at he surely developed a technique not only adequate but of very unusual excellence.
Trollope was a voluminous writer: he gives in his delightful autobiography the list of his own works and it numbers upwards of sixty titles, of which over forty are fiction. His capacity for writing, judged by mere bulk, appears to have been inherited; for his mother, turning authoress at fifty years of age, produced no less than one hundred and fourteen volumes! There is inferior work, and plenty of it, among the sum-total of his activity, but two series, amounting to about twenty books, include the fiction upon which his fame so solidly rests: the Cathedral series and the Parliamentary series. In the former, choosing the southern-western counties of Wiltshire and Hants as Hardy chose Wessex for his peculiar venue, he described the clerical life of his land as it had never been described before, showing the type as made up of men like unto other men, unromantic, often this-worldly and smug, yet varying the type, making room for such an idealist as Crawley as well as for sleek bishops and ecclesiastical wire-pullers. Neither his young women nor his holy men are overdrawn a jot: they have the continence of Nature. But they are not cynically presented. You like them and take pleasure in their society; they are so beautifully true! The inspiration of these studies came to him as he walked under the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral; and one is never far away from the influence of the cathedral class. The life is the worldy-godly life of that microcosm, a small, genteel, conventional urban society; in sharp contrast with the life depicted by Hardy in the same part of the land,—but like another world, because his portraiture finds its subjects among peasant-folk and yeoman—the true primitive types whose speech is slow and their roots deep down in the soil.
The realism of Trollope was not confined to the mere reproduction of externals; he gave the illusion of character, without departing from what can be verified by what men know. His photographs were largely imaginary, as all artistic work must be; he constructed his stories out of his own mind. But all is based on what may be called a splendidly reasoned and reasonable experience with Life. His especial service was thus to instruct us about English society, without tedium, within a domain which was voluntarily selected for his own. In this he was also a pioneer in that local fiction which is a geographical effect of realism. And to help him in this setting down of what he believed to be true of humanity, was a style so lucid and simple as perfectly to serve his purpose. For unobtrusive ease, idiomatic naturalness and that familiarity which escapes vulgarity and retains a quiet distinction, no one has excelled him. It is one reason why we feel an intimate knowledge of his characters. Mr. Howells declares it is Trollope who is most like Austen "in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day"—though he goes on to deplore that he too often preferred to be "like the caricaturist Thackeray"—a somewhat hard saying. It is a particular comfort to read such a writer when intensely personal psychology is the order of the day and neither style nor interpretation in fiction is simple.
If Trollope can be said to be derivative at all, it is Thackeray who most influenced him. He avows his admiration, wrote the other's life, and deemed him one who advanced truth-telling in the Novel. Yet, as was stated, he did not altogether approve of the Master, thinking his satire too steady a view instead of an occasional weapon. Indeed his strictures in the biography have at times a cool, almost hostile sound. He may or may not have taken a hint from Thackeray on the re-introduction of characters in other books—a pleasant device long antedating the nineteenth century, since one finds it in Lyly's "Euphues." Trollope also disliked Dickens' habit of exaggeration (as he thought it) even when it was used in the interests of reform, and satirized the tendency in the person of Mr. Popular Sentiment in "The Warden."
The more one studies Trollope and the farther he recedes into the past, the firmer grows the conviction that he is a very distinctive figure of Victorian fiction, a pioneer who led the way and was to be followed by a horde of secondary realistic novelists who could imitate his methods but not reproduce his pleasant effect.