It is not likely that Mr. Trollope's advent in this country would have given rise to any remark or excitement, his novels, clever though they be, not having taken hold of the people's heart as did those of Dickens. He came among us quietly; the newspapers gave him no flourish of trumpets; he traveled about unknown; hence it was, that few knew a new book was to be written upon America by one bearing a name not over-popular thirty years ago. Curiosity was confined to the friends and acquaintances of Mr. Trollope, who were naturally not a little anxious that he should conscientiously write such a book as would remove the existing prejudice to the name of Trollope, and render him personally as popular as his novels. For there are, we believe, few intelligent Americans (and Mr. Trollope is good enough to say that we of the North are all intelligent) who are not ready to 'faire l'aimable' to the kindly, genial author of North-America. It is not being rash to state that Mr. Trollope, in his last book, has not disappointed his warmest personal friends in this country, and this is saying much, when it is considered that many of them are radically opposed to him in many of his opinions, and most of them hold very different views from him in regard to the present war. They are not disappointed, because Mr. Trollope has labored to be impartial in his criticisms. He has, at least, endeavored to lay aside his English prejudices and judge us in a spirit of truth and good-fellowship. Mr. Trollope inaugurated a new era in British book-making upon America, when he wrote: 'If I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well, and which do hang upon each other so constantly, I should think that I had cause to be proud of my work.' In saying this much, Mr. Trollope has said what others of his ilk—Bulwer, Thackeray, and Dickens—would not have said, and he may well be proud, or, at least, he can afford not to be proud, of a superior honesty and frankness. He has won for himself kind thoughts on this side of the Atlantic, and were Americans convinced that the body English were imbued with the spirit of Mr. Trollope, there would be little left of the resuscitated 'soreness.'
In his introduction, Mr. Trollope frankly acknowledges that 'it is very hard to write about any country a book that does not represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of view.' He confesses that he is not a philosophico-political or politico-statistical or a statistico-scientific writer, and hence, 'ridicule and censure run glibly from the pen, and form themselves into sharp paragraphs, which are pleasant to the reader. Whereas, eulogy is commonly dull, and too frequently sounds as though it were false.' We agree with him, that 'there is much difficulty in expressing a verdict which is intended to be favorable, but which, though favorable, shall not be falsely eulogistic, and though true, not offensive.' Mr. Trollope has not been offensive either in his praise or dispraise; and when we look upon him in the light in which he paints himself—that of an English novelist—he has, at least, done his best by us. We could not expect from him such a book as Emerson wrote on English Traits, or such an one as Thomas Buckle would have written had death not staid his great work of Civilization. Nor could we look to him for that which John Stuart Mill—the English De Tocqueville—alone can give. For much that we expected we have received, for that which is wanting we shall now find fault, but good-naturedly, we hope.
Our first ground of complaint against Mr. Trollope's North-America, is its extreme verbosity. Had it been condensed to one half, or at least one third of its present size, the spirit of the book had been less weakened, and the taste of the public better satisfied. The question naturally arises in an inquiring mind, if the author could make so much out of a six months' tour through the Northern States, what would the consequences have been had he remained a year, and visited Dixie's land as well? The conclusions logically arrived at are, to say the least, very unfavorable to weak-eyed persons who are condemned to read the cheap American edition. Life is too short, and books are too numerous, to allow of repetition; and at no time is Mr. Trollope so guilty in this respect as when he dilates upon those worthies, Mason and Slidell, in connection with the Trent affair. It was very natural, especially as England has come off first-best in this matter, that Mr. Trollope should have made a feature of the Trent in reporting the state of the American pulse thereon. One reference to the controversy was desirable, two endurable, but the third return to the charge is likely to meet with impatient exclamations from the reader, who heartily sympathizes with the author when he says: 'And now, I trust, I may finish my book without again naming Messrs. Slidell and Mason.'
It certainly was rash to rave as we did on this subject, but it was quite natural, when our jurists, (even the Hon. Caleb Cushing) who were supposed to know their business, assured us that we had right on our side. It was extremely ridiculous to put Captain Wilkes upon a pedestal a little lower than Bunker-Hill monument, and present him with a hero's sword for doing what was then considered only his duty. But it must be remembered that at that time the mere performance of duty by a public officer was so extraordinary a phenomenon that loyal people were brought to believe it merited especial recognition. Our Government, and not the people, were to blame. Had the speech of Charles Sumner, delivered on his 'field-day,' been the verdict of the Washington Cabinet previous to the reception of England's expostulations, the position taken by America on this subject would have been highly dignified and honorable. As it is, we stand with feathers ruffled and torn. But if, as we suppose, the Trent imbroglio leads to a purification of maritime law, not only America, but the entire commercial world will be greatly indebted to the super-patriotism of Captain Wilkes.
'The charming women of Boston' are inclined to quarrel with their friend Mr. Trollope, for ridiculing their powers of argumentation apropos to Captain Wilkes, for Mr. Trollope must confess they knew quite as much about what they were talking as the lawyers by whom they were instructed. They have had more than their proper share of revenge, however, meted out for them by the reviewer of the London Critic, who writes as follows:
'Mr. Trollope was in Boston when the first news about the Trent arrived. Of course, every body was full of the subject at once—Mr. Trollope, we presume, not excluded—albeit he is rather sarcastic upon the young ladies who began immediately to chatter about it. 'Wheaton is quite clear about it,' said one young girl to me. It was the first I had heard of Wheaton, and so far was obliged to knock under.' Yet Mr. Trollope, knowing very little more of Wheaton than he did before, and obviously nothing of the great authorities on maritime law, inflicts upon his readers page after page of argument upon the Trent affair, not half so delightful as the pretty babble of the ball-room belle. With all due respect to Mr. Trollope, and his attractions, we are quite sure that we would much sooner get our international law from the lips of the fair Bostonian than from his.'
After such a champion as this, could the fair Bostonians have the heart to assail Mr. Trollope?
Mr. Trollope treats of our civil war at great length; in fact, the reverberations of himself on this matter are quite as objectionable as those in the Trent affair. But it is his treatment of this subject that must ever be a source of regret to the earnest thinkers who are gradually becoming the masters of our Government's policy, who constitute the bone and muscle of the land, the rank and file of the army, and who are changing the original character of the war into that of a holy crusade. It is to be deplored, because Mr. Trollope's book will no doubt influence English opinion, to a certain extent, and therefore militate against us, and we already know how his mistaken opinions have been seized upon by pro-slavery journals in this country as a bonne bouche which they rarely obtain from so respectable a source; the more palatable to them, coming from that nationality which we have always been taught to believe was more abolition in its creed than William Lloyd Garrison himself, and from whose people we have received most of our lectures on the sin of slavery. It is sad that so fine a nature as that of Mr. Trollope should not feel conscience-stricken in believing that 'to mix up the question of general abolition with this war must be the work of a man too ignorant to understand the real subject of the war, or too false to his country to regard it.' Yet it is strange that these 'too ignorant' or 'too false' men are the very ones that Mr. Trollope holds up to admiration, and declares that any nation might be proud to claim their genius. Longfellow and Lowell, Emerson and Motley, to whom we could add almost all the well-known thinkers of the country, men after his own heart in most things, belong to this 'ignorant' or 'false' sect. Is it their one madness? That is a strange madness which besets our greatest men and women; a marvelous anomaly surely. Yet there must be something sympathetic in abolitionism to Mr. Trollope, for he prefers Boston, the centre of this ignorance, to all other American cities, and finds his friends for the most part among these false ones, by which we are to conclude that Mr. Trollope is by nature an abolitionist, but that circumstances have been unfavorable to his proper development. And these circumstances we ascribe to a hasty and superficial visit to the British West-India colonies.
It is well known that in his entertaining book on travels in the West-Indies and Spanish Main, Mr. Trollope undertakes to prove that emancipation has both ruined the commercial prosperity of the British islands and degraded the free blacks to a level with the idle brute. Mr. Trollope is still firm in this opinion, notwithstanding the statistics of the Blue Book, which prove that these colonies never were in so flourishing a condition as at present. We, in America, have also had the same fact demonstrated by figures, in that very plainly written book called the Ordeal of Free Labor. Mr. Trollope, no doubt, saw some very lazy negroes, wallowing in dirt, and living only for the day, but later developments have proved that his investigations could have been simply those of a dilettante. It is highly probable that the planters who have been shorn of their riches by the edict of Emancipation, should paint the present condition of the blacks in any thing but rose-colors, and we, of course, believe that Mr. Trollope believes what he has written. He is none the less mistaken, if we are to pin our faith to the Blue Book, which we are told never lies. And yet, believing that emancipation has made a greater brute than ever of the negro, Mr. Trollope rejoices in the course which has been pursued by the home government. If both white man and black man are worse off than they were before, what good could have been derived from the reform, and by what right ought he to rejoice? Mr. Trollope claims to be an anti-slavery man, but we must confess that to our way of arguing, the ground he stands upon in this matter is any thing but terra firma. Mr. Trollope was probably thinking of those dirty West-India negroes when he made the following comments upon a lecture delivered by Wendell Phillips:
'I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty, as a professed philanthropist; and that when the philanthropist's ardor lies negro-ward, it then assumes the deepest die of venom and bloodthirstiness. There are four millions of slaves in the Southern States, none of whom have any capacity for self-maintenance or self-control. Four millions of slaves, with the necessities of children, with the passions of men, and the ignorance of savages! And Mr. Phillips would emancipate these at a blow; would, were it possible for him to do so, set them loose upon the soil to tear their masters, destroy each other, and make such a hell upon earth as has never even yet come from the uncontrolled passions and unsatisfied wants of men.'