The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

Mr. Howells not long ago, in a criticism of the novels of Archibald Marshall, refers to him as a “disciple of Anthony Trollope,” whom he calls “the greatest of the Victorians.” This is high praise—perhaps too high. Criticism is, after all, simply the expression of an opinion; the important question is, whether one has a right to an opinion. It is easy to understand why the author of “Silas Lapham” should accord high place to Trollope.

Trollope can never be popular in the sense that Dickens is popular, nor is it so necessary to have him on the shelves as to have Thackeray; but any one who has not made Trollope’s acquaintance has a great treat in store; nor do I know an author who can be read and re-read with greater pleasure. But to fall completely under the lure of his—genius, I was going to say, but I must be careful—he should be read quietly—and thoroughly: that is to say, some thirty or forty volumes out of a possible hundred or more.

It may at once be admitted that there are no magnificent scenes in Trollope as there are in Thackeray; as, for example, where Rawdon Crawley in “Vanity Fair,” coming home unexpectedly, finds Becky entertaining the Marquis of Steyne. On the other hand, you will not find in any of his best stories anything so deadly dull as the endless talk about Georgie Osborne, aged variously five, seven, or ten years, in the same volume. How often have I longed to snatch that infant from his nurse and impale him on the railings of St. James’s Park!

For the most part, people in Trollope’s stories lead lives very like our own, dependent upon how our fortunes may be cast. They have their failures and their successes, and fall in love and fall out again, very much as we do. At last we begin to know their peculiarities better than we know our own, and we think of them, not as characters in a book, but as friends and acquaintances whom we have grown up with. Some we like and some bore us exceedingly—just as in real life. His characters do not lack style,—the Duke of Omnium is a very great person indeed,—but Trollope himself has none. He has little or no brilliancy, and we like him the better for it. The brilliant person may become very fatiguing to live with—after a time.

It is, however, in this country rather than in England that Trollope finds his greatest admirers. To-day the English call him “mid-Victorian.” Nothing worse can be said. Even Dickens and Thackeray have to fight against an injunction to this effect, which I cannot believe is to be made permanent. Nothing is more seductive and dangerous than prophecy, but one more forecast will not greatly increase its bulk, and so I venture to say that, Dickens and Thackeray aside, Trollope will outlive all the other novelists of his time. Dickens has come to stay; Thackeray will join the immortals with two novels under his arm, and perhaps one novel of George Eliot and one by Charles Reade will survive; but Beaconsfield, Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley, and a host of others once famous, will join the long procession headed for oblivion, led by Ann Radcliffe.

And if it be Trollope’s fate to outlast all but the greatest of his contemporaries, it will be due to the simplicity and lack of effort with which he tells his tale. There is no straining after effect—his characters are real, live men and women, without a trace of caricature or exaggeration. His humor is delicious and his plots sufficient, although he has told us that he never takes any care with them; and aside from his character-drawing, he will be studied for the lifelike pictures of the upper-and middle-class English society of his time. Not one only, but all of his novels might be called “The Way We Live Now.” Someone has said that he is our greatest realist since Fielding; he has been compared with Jane Austen, lacking her purity of style, but dealing with a much larger world.

“I do not think it probable that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction.” So wrote Trollope in the concluding chapter of his autobiography. And he adds: “But if it does, that permanency of success will probably rest on the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and the Reverend Mr. Crawley.” Now it is as certain that Trollope is remembered as it is that we are in the next century; but it is not so much for any single character, or group of characters, or, indeed, any single book, that he is remembered, as it is for the qualities I have referred to. We may not love the English people, but we all love England; we love to go there and revel in its past; and the England that Trollope described so accurately is rapidly passing away; it was going perhaps more quickly than the English people themselves knew, even before this war began.

To read Trollope is to take a course in modern English history—social history to be sure, but just as important as political, and much more interesting. He has written a whole series of English political novels, it is true, but their interest is entirely aside from politics. It may be admitted that there are dreary places in Trollope, as there are dreary reaches on the lovely Thames, but they can be skipped, and more rapidly; and, as Dr. Johnson says, “Who but a fool reads a book through?”

The reason so many American girls marry, or at least used to marry, Englishmen, was because they found them different from the men whom they had grown up with; not finer, not as fine, perhaps, but more interesting. It is for some such reason as this that we get more pleasure out of Trollope than we do out of Howells, whose work, in some respects, resembles his. And Trollope, although he frequently stops the progress of his story to tell us what a fine thing an English gentleman is, never hesitated to “Paint the warts,” and it is not altogether unpleasant to see the warts—on others.