Further, I should like to set down my appreciation of the facilities afforded to me by the authorities of the British Museum and of the Bodleian Library. Their willingness to shorten in my favour the tedious process of extracting scattered volumes from their stores and vaults saved much fatigue and hours of valuable time.
To my mother, to my wife, and to one of my publishers I owe thanks for friendly collaboration at points where two heads and four hands had more than twice the value of half their number. Lastly, and perhaps mostly, I am indebted, for secretarial assistance and for help in the labour of research, to Miss Martha Smith, whose accuracy and devotion have halved my personal toil.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
1815-1882
ANTHONY TROLLOPE[[3]]
Trollope's novels, like those of Jane Austen, are of the very essence of fiction. Whatever they may lack in verbal subtlety, in passion, in tragedy or in comedy of idea, they never lack that spiritual skeleton without which no structure of a story-teller's imagining can survive. Palaces more delicate, more romantic, more brilliant and more terrible than those of Trollope have been erected and have stood to win the admiration of posterity; but their splendour and their beauty are due more to the solid material that upholds their walls and roofs than to the skill and fancy of their decoration. Other palaces, because they lacked such invisible but vital solidity, have drawn for an hour the fickle favour of the crowd and then toppled into dust. It is easy, in fiction, to create a nine days' wonder, but hard indeed to win the esteem of ninety years.
[3]. For his consent to the reprinting of this Essay I am grateful to the Editor of the “Nineteenth Century and After.”
Trollope has achieved that victory. Oblivion can now never be his, for he has lived his bad times and survived. As must any artist worth the name, he suffered eclipse—temporary, indeed, but so severe as at one time to threaten permanence. He was scorned as dowdy and parochial by the brilliant metropolitans of a succeeding generation. Only in the hearts of quiet folk and among readers uninstructed in the genius of their own time were his books remembered and cherished.
Until, slowly and slowly, opinion has begun to change. Quality has outstayed vogue, and the latter comes smirking back to the smiles of a lover yesterday despised. Indeed, Trollope is in a fair way to become once again the fashion. For a while he will be honoured by the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. Then, when they have turned their volatile benevolence to some other quarter, he will settle firmly in the respect of the critical. And that will at once be fame and his deserts.
Any summary analysis of Trollope's individual novels is wellnigh impossible, in view not only of the bulk of his work but also of its scope and richness of content. His quality is more intangible and at the same time more concentrated than that of the other writers treated in this book. “Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable,” wrote Trollope himself. And again: “The primary object of a novelist is to please.” Readability has, in these latter days, become a term of condescension. But that is the fault of a superior age, and for the ten who use the word contemptuously there are ten thousand who, did they care to do so, would give it an older and a more honourable meaning. To them, as always to the large public of novel-readers, fiction, when it is not costume-romance, mystery-story, or topical propaganda, is a revelation of their own lives. It is this demand for an expression of emotions in which the normal reader can share that Trollope so amazingly satisfies. No précis of plot, no indication of social setting, of character types, nor of period, can in his case convey the essence of any particular novel.
Nevertheless his stories fall into certain specific categories, some of which form actual series of tales with characters reappearing from volume to volume, while others, although severally independent and self-contained, may be classified as belonging to one type of fiction or to another.