Fox-hunting, so fatiguing and disappointing in reality, becomes a delight in the pages of Trollope. The fox “breaks” at last, the usual accident happens, someone misjudges a brook or a fence and is thrown. If the accident is serious, they have a big man down from London. I know just who he will be before he arrives; and when the services of a solicitor or man of business are required, he turns out to be an old friend.
Although I have never knowingly killed a grouse or a partridge, being utterly unfamiliar with the use of shooting irons of any kind, Trollope makes me long for the first of August, that I may tell my man to pack my box and take places in the night mail for Scotland.
And then comes the long hoped-for invitation to spend a week end at Matching Priory; or, it may be that the Duke of Omnium’s great establishment, Gatherum Castle, is to be open to me. Dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, M.P.’s, with the latest news from town, of ministries falling and forming—I have been through it all before. I know the company; when a man enters the room, I know in advance just what turn the gossip will take.
But, above all, the clergy! Was there ever a more wonderful gallery of portraits? Balzac, you will say. I don’t know—perhaps; but beginning with the delightful old Warden, his rich, pompous, but very human son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantley, Bishop Proudie and his shrewish lady, and that Uriah Heep of clergymen, Mr. Slope—it is a wonderful assemblage of living men and women leading everyday lives without romance, almost without incident.
Trollope was the painter, perhaps I should say the photographer, par excellence of his time. He set up his camera and took his pictures from every point of view. Possibly he was not a very great artist, but he was a wonderfully skillful workman. As he says of himself, he was at his writing-table at half-past five in the morning; he required of himself 250 words every quarter of an hour; his motto was nulla dies sine linea—no wet towel around his brow. He went “doggedly” at it, as Dr. Johnson says, and wrote an enormous number of books for a total of over seventy thousand pounds. He looked upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid.
“You are defied to find in Trollope a remark or an action out of keeping with the character concerned. I would give a pound for every such instance found by an objector, if he would give me a penny for every strictly consistent speech or instance I might find in return.” I am quoting from a little book of essays by Street; and it seems to me that he has here put his finger upon one of Trollope’s most remarkable qualities: his absolute faithfulness. He was a realist, if I understand the word, but he did not care to deal much with the disagreeable or the shocking, as those whom we call realists usually do.
His pictures of the clergy, of whom he says that, when he began to write, he really knew very little, delighted some and offended others. An English critic, Hain Friswell, a supreme prig, says they are a disgrace, almost a libel; but the world knows better. On the whole his clergy are a very human lot, with faults and weaknesses just like our own. To my mind Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s lady, is a character worthy of Dickens at his very best. There is not a trace of caricature or exaggeration about her, and the description of her reception is one of the most amusing chapters ever written. In another vein, and very delicate, is the treatment of Mrs. Proudie’s death. The old Bishop feels a certain amount of grief: his mainstay, his lifelong partner has been taken from him; but he remembers that life with her was not always easy; one feels that he will be consoled.
Trollope tells an amusing story of Mrs. Proudie. He was writing one day at the Athenæum Club when two clergymen entered the room, each with a novel in his hand. Soon they began to abuse what they were reading, and it turned out that each was reading one of his novels. Said one, “Here is that Archdeacon whom we have had in every novel that he has ever written.” “And here,” said the other, “is that old Duke whom he talked about till everyone is tired of him. If I could not invent new characters I would not write novels at all.” Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was impossible for them not to be overheard. Trollope got up and, standing between them, acknowledged himself to be the culprit; and as to Mrs. Proudie, said he, “I’ll go home and kill her before the week is out.”
“The biographical part of literature is what I love most.” After his death in 1882, his son published an autobiography which Trollope had written some years before. Swinburne calls it “exquisitely comical and conscientiously coxcombical.” Whatever this may mean, it is generally thought to have harmed his reputation somewhat. In it he speaks at length of his novels: tells us how and when and where he wrote them; expressing his opinion as dispassionately as if he were discussing the work of an author he had never seen. Painstaking and conscientious he may have been, but in his autobiography he shows no sign of it—on the contrary, he stresses quantity rather than quality.
For this very reason a set—what the publishers call a “definitive edition”—of Trollope will never be published. There is no demand for one. Editions of him in sumptuous binding, gilt-top, with uncut (and unopened) edges, under glass, will not be found in the houses of those who select their books at the same time they make their choice of the equipment of their billiard-room. The immortality of morocco Trollope will never have; but on the open shelves of the man or woman whose leisure hours are spent in their libraries, who know what is best in English fiction, there will be found invariably six or ten of his novels in cloth, by this publisher or that, worn and shapeless from much reading.