Again, honest though he was, he accepted and used false tricks and conventions calculated, in the ’eighties and ’nineties, to awake frenzy in any young practitioner who, however incompetent, was trying to learn how a novel should be written. The worst “stage aside” of an old drama was as nothing in comparison with Trollope’s easy-going remarks, dropped anywhere in the story, and anyhow, that “This is a novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. I might just as easily make my heroine do this as do that. Which shall it be?... Well, I am going to make her do that; for if she did this, what would become of my novel?” One can imagine Henry James wincing physically at such a question posed in cold print by an artist; as in a most catholic and charitable paper—written in 1883, when the young dogs were assembling to insult Trollope’s carcase—he reveals himself as wincing over the first sentence in the last chapter of Barchester Towers: “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar plums.” James laments:
These little slaps at credulity ... are very discouraging, but they are even more inexplicable; for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged from the point of view of that rather vague consideration of form which is the only canon we have a right to impose upon Trollope. It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and his narrative as history. It is only as a historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic he must relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid storytellers....
Yes; but on further acquaintance with Trollope one discovers that this trick (annoying always) of asking, “Now what shall we make Mrs. Bold do?—accept Mr. Arabin, or reject him?” is no worse than “uncle’s fun,” as I may put it. Uncle is just playing with us, though we wish he wouldn’t. In fact, Trollope never chooses the wrong answer to the infelicitous question. He is wise and unerringly right every time. You will (I think) search his novels in vain for a good man or a good woman untrue to duty as weighed out between heart and conscience.
Another offence in Trollope is his distressing employment of facetious names—“Mr. Quiverful” for a philoprogenitive clergyman, “Dr. Fillgrave” for a family physician, etc. “It would be better,” murmurs Henry James pathetically, “to go back to Bunyan at once.” (Trollope, in fact, goes back farther—to the abominable tradition of Ben Jonson; and it is the less excusable because he could invent perfect names when he tried—Archdeacon Grantly, Johnny Eames, Algernon Crosbie, Mrs. Proudie, the Dales of Allington, the Thornes of Ullathorne, Barchester, Framley—names, families, places fitting like gloves.) And still worse was he advised when he introduced caricature, for which he had small gift, into his stories; “taking off” eminent bishops in the disguise of objectionable small boys, or poking laborious fun at Dickens and Carlyle under the titles of Mr. Sentiment and Dr. Pessimist Anticant. The Warden is in conception, and largely in execution, a beautiful story of an old man’s conscience. It is a short story, too. I know of none that could be more easily shortened to an absolute masterpiece by a pair of scissors.
With Trollope, as with Byron, in these days a critic finds himself at first insensibly forced, as though by shouldering of a crowd, upon apology for the man’s reputation.
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!