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.”