As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in Hypatia (chap. xxi.), who "was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately"—"He lived . . . in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one"—and so on. Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the "squire-bishop." But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.
[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as "and," "is," "are," "the," "who," "his," "its," "have," "been"—words without which few English sentences can be constructed—do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl.
IX
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run—that Anthony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers.
I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the exception of Charlotte Brontë) I have often seen and heard speak in public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in his posthumous Autobiography, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.
Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book—one of the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for—it is his business to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more modest bonhomie, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim to be a hero; he has no rare qualities—or none but industry and courage—and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work—you may think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas—but that is a true picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a brave soul, a genial companion.
With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, "I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour." George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought—she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together," she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope, "with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry. It's not the head that does it—it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!" In his Autobiography he has elaborately explained this process—how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. Dr. Thorne was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing Dr. Thorne he began The Bertrams. It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all. Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is honest work, the best he could do.
He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in The Last Chronicle of Barset; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him—this is to tell us palpable nonsense.
Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.