FOR a time after the death of any author, the world, if it has greatly admired that author, begins to feel that it has been imposed upon, becomes a little ashamed of its former enthusiasm and ends by neglecting him altogether. This would seem to have been Anthony Trollope’s case, to judge from the occasional comment of English critics, who, if they refer to him at all, do so in some such phrase as, “About this time Trollope also enjoyed a popularity which we can no longer understand.” From one brief paper purporting to be an estimate of his present status, these nuggets of criticism are extracted:—

And in referring to Plantagenet Palliser, who figures largely in so many of his novels, the author says:—

Finally, when it is grudgingly admitted that he did some good work, the answer to the question, “Why is such work neglected?” is, “Because the world in which Trollope lived has passed away.” It would seem that absurdity could go no further.

American judgment is in general of a different tenor, although Professor Phelps, of Yale, in his recent volume, “The Advance of the English Novel,” dismisses Trollope with a single paragraph, in which is embedded the remark, “No one would dare call Trollope a genius.” Short, sharp and decisive work this; but Professor Phelps is clearing the decks for Meredith, to whom he devotes twenty or more pages. I respect the opinion of college professors as much as Charles Lamb respected the equator; nevertheless, I maintain that, if Trollope was not a genius, he was a very great writer; and I am not alone.

Only a few days ago a cultivated man of affairs, referring to an interesting contemporary caricature of Dickens and Thackeray which bore the legend, “Two Great Victorians,” remarked, “They were great Victorians, indeed, but I have come to wonder in these later years whether Anthony Trollope will not outlive them both.” And while the mere book-collector should be careful how he challenges the opinion of “one who makes his living by reading books and then writing about them,”—the phrase is Professor Phelps’s,—nevertheless, when one’s opinion is supported, as mine is, by the authority of such a novelist as our own Howells, he may perhaps be forgiven for speaking up.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MESSRS ELLIOT & FRY
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MESSRS ELLIOT & FRY

Mr. Howells not long ago, in a criticism of the novels of Archibald Marshall, refers to him as a “disciple of Anthony Trollope,” whom he calls “the greatest of the Victorians.” This is high praise—perhaps too high. Criticism is, after all, simply the expression of an opinion; the important question is, whether one has a right to an opinion. It is easy to understand why the author of “Silas Lapham” should accord high place to Trollope.

Trollope can never be popular in the sense that Dickens is popular, nor is it so necessary to have him on the shelves as to have Thackeray; but any one who has not made Trollope’s acquaintance has a great treat in store; nor do I know an author who can be read and re-read with greater pleasure. But to fall completely under the lure of his—genius, I was going to say, but I must be careful—he should be read quietly—and thoroughly: that is to say, some thirty or forty volumes out of a possible hundred or more.

It may at once be admitted that there are no magnificent scenes in Trollope as there are in Thackeray; as, for example, where Rawdon Crawley in “Vanity Fair,” coming home unexpectedly, finds Becky entertaining the Marquis of Steyne. On the other hand, you will not find in any of his best stories anything so deadly dull as the endless talk about Georgie Osborne, aged variously five, seven, or ten years, in the same volume. How often have I longed to snatch that infant from his nurse and impale him on the railings of St. James’s Park!

For the most part, people in Trollope’s stories lead lives very like our own, dependent upon how our fortunes may be cast. They have their failures and their successes, and fall in love and fall out again, very much as we do. At last we begin to know their peculiarities better than we know our own, and we think of them, not as characters in a book, but as friends and acquaintances whom we have grown up with. Some we like and some bore us exceedingly—just as in real life. His characters do not lack style,—the Duke of Omnium is a very great person indeed,—but Trollope himself has none. He has little or no brilliancy, and we like him the better for it. The brilliant person may become very fatiguing to live with—after a time.

It is, however, in this country rather than in England that Trollope finds his greatest admirers. To-day the English call him “mid-Victorian.” Nothing worse can be said. Even Dickens and Thackeray have to fight against an injunction to this effect, which I cannot believe is to be made permanent. Nothing is more seductive and dangerous than prophecy, but one more forecast will not greatly increase its bulk, and so I venture to say that, Dickens and Thackeray aside, Trollope will outlive all the other novelists of his time. Dickens has come to stay; Thackeray will join the immortals with two novels under his arm, and perhaps one novel of George Eliot and one by Charles Reade will survive; but Beaconsfield, Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley, and a host of others once famous, will join the long procession headed for oblivion, led by Ann Radcliffe.

And if it be Trollope’s fate to outlast all but the greatest of his contemporaries, it will be due to the simplicity and lack of effort with which he tells his tale. There is no straining after effect—his characters are real, live men and women, without a trace of caricature or exaggeration. His humor is delicious and his plots sufficient, although he has told us that he never takes any care with them; and aside from his character-drawing, he will be studied for the lifelike pictures of the upper-and middle-class English society of his time. Not one only, but all of his novels might be called “The Way We Live Now.” Someone has said that he is our greatest realist since Fielding; he has been compared with Jane Austen, lacking her purity of style, but dealing with a much larger world.

“I do not think it probable that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction.” So wrote Trollope in the concluding chapter of his autobiography. And he adds: “But if it does, that permanency of success will probably rest on the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and the Reverend Mr. Crawley.” Now it is as certain that Trollope is remembered as it is that we are in the next century; but it is not so much for any single character, or group of characters, or, indeed, any single book, that he is remembered, as it is for the qualities I have referred to. We may not love the English people, but we all love England; we love to go there and revel in its past; and the England that Trollope described so accurately is rapidly passing away; it was going perhaps more quickly than the English people themselves knew, even before this war began.

To read Trollope is to take a course in modern English history—social history to be sure, but just as important as political, and much more interesting. He has written a whole series of English political novels, it is true, but their interest is entirely aside from politics. It may be admitted that there are dreary places in Trollope, as there are dreary reaches on the lovely Thames, but they can be skipped, and more rapidly; and, as Dr. Johnson says, “Who but a fool reads a book through?”

The reason so many American girls marry, or at least used to marry, Englishmen, was because they found them different from the men whom they had grown up with; not finer, not as fine, perhaps, but more interesting. It is for some such reason as this that we get more pleasure out of Trollope than we do out of Howells, whose work, in some respects, resembles his. And Trollope, although he frequently stops the progress of his story to tell us what a fine thing an English gentleman is, never hesitated to “Paint the warts,” and it is not altogether unpleasant to see the warts—on others.

Trollope takes, or appears to take, no care with his plots. The amazing thing about him is that he sometimes gives his plot away; but this seems to make no difference. In the dead centre of “Can You Forgive Her?” Trollope says that you must forgive her if his book is written aright. Lady Mason, in “Orley Farm,” confesses to her ancient lover that she is guilty of a crime; but when she comes to be tried for it, the interest in her trial is intense; so in “Phineas Redux,” where Phineas is tried for murder, the reader is assured that he is not guilty and that it will come out all right in the end; but this does not in the least detract from the interest of the story. Compare with this Wilkie Collins’s “Moonstone,” probably the best plot in English fiction. The moment that you know who stole the diamond and how it was stolen, the interest is at an end.

I have referred to the trial in “Orley Farm.” It is, in my judgment, the best trial scene in any novel. I made this statement once to a well-read lawyer, and he was inclined to dispute the point, and of course mentioned “Pickwick.” I reminded him that I had said the best, not the best known. Bardell vs. Pickwick is funny, inimitably funny, never to be forgotten, but burlesque. The trial in “A Tale of Two Cities” is heroic romance; but the trial in “Orley Farm” is real life. The only trial which can be compared to it is Effie Deans’s, which I confess is infinitely more pathetic, too much so to be thoroughly enjoyed.

In “Orley Farm” one can see and hear Mr. Furnival, with his low voice and transfixing eye; one knows that the witness in his hands is as good as done for; and as for Mr. Chaffanbrass,—and did Dickens ever invent a better name?—he knew his work was cut out for him, and he did it with horrible skill. One sees plainly that the witnesses were trying to tell the truth, but that Chaffanbrass, intent on winning his case, would not let them: he was fighting, not for the truth, but for victory. The sideplay is excellent, the suppressed excitement in the court-room, the judge, the lawyers, are all good.

At last Mr. Furnival rises: “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “I never rose to plead a client’s cause with more confidence than I now feel in pleading that of my friend, Lady Mason.” And after three hours he closes his great speech with this touching bit: “And now I shall leave my client’s case in your hands. As to the verdict which you will give, I have no apprehension. You know as well as I do that she has not been guilty of this terrible crime. That you will so pronounce I do not for a moment doubt. But I do hope that the verdict will be accompanied by some expression on your part which may show to the world at large how great has been the wickedness displayed in the accusation.”

And Trollope adds: “And yet as he sat down he knew that she had been guilty! To his ear her guilt had never been confessed; but yet he knew that it was so, and knowing that, he had been able to speak as though her innocence were a thing of course. That those witnesses had spoken the truth he also knew, and yet he had been able to hold them up to the execration of all around them as though they had committed the worst of crimes from the foulest of motives! And more than this, stranger than this, worse than this,—when the legal world knew,—as the legal world soon did know,—that all this had been so, the legal world found no fault with Mr. Furnival, conceiving that he had done his duty by his client in a manner becoming an English barrister and an English gentleman.”

I have frequently heard people say that they would like to attend a trial. It is not worth while: trials are either shocking or stupid; the best way to see a trial is to read “Orley Farm.”

Those of us who love Trollope love him for those very qualities which cause fatigue in others. Our lives, it may be, are fairly strenuous; it is hardly necessary for us to have our feelings wrung of an evening. When the day is done and I settle down in my arm-chair by the crackling wood fire, I am no longer inclined to problems, real or imaginary. I suppose the average man does his reading with what comfort he may after dinner; it is the time for peace—and Trollope. It may be that the reader falls asleep. What matter? Better this, I should say, than that he should be kept awake by the dissection of a human soul. This vivisection business is too painful. No, give me those long descriptions of house-parties, those chapters made up of dinner conversations, of endless hunting scenes, of editorials from newspapers, of meetings of the House, of teas on the Terrace, and above all, give me the clergy—not in real life for a minute, but in the pages of Trollope.

But nothing happens, you say. I admit that there is very little blood and no thunder; but not all of us care for blood and thunder. Trollope interests one in a gentler way; in fact, you may not know that you have been interested until you look at your watch and find it past midnight. And you can step from one book to another almost without knowing it. The characters, the situations repeat themselves over and over again; your interest is not always intense, but it never entirely flags. You are always saying to yourself, I’ll just read one more chapter.

After you have read fifteen or twenty of his novels,—and you will surely read this number if you read him at all,—you will find that you are as intimate with his characters as you are with the members of your own family, and you will probably understand them a great deal better. Professor Phelps says that he is constantly besieged with the question: “Where can I find a really good story?” I would recommend that he keep a list of Trollope’s best novels at hand. Surely they are in accord with his own definition of what a novel should be—a good story well told. I will make such a list for him if he is in any difficulty about it.

I am told by those who know, that Trollope’s sporting scenes are faultless. Never having found a horse with a neck properly adjusted for me to cling to, I have given up riding. Seated in my easy-chair, novel in hand, in imagination I thrust my feet into riding-boots and hear the click of my spurs on the gravel, as I walk to my mount; for some one has “put me up”; forgetful of my increasing girth, I rather fancy myself in my hunting clothes. Astride my borrowed mount, following a pack of hounds, I am off in the direction of Trumpeton Wood.

Fox-hunting, so fatiguing and disappointing in reality, becomes a delight in the pages of Trollope. The fox “breaks” at last, the usual accident happens, someone misjudges a brook or a fence and is thrown. If the accident is serious, they have a big man down from London. I know just who he will be before he arrives; and when the services of a solicitor or man of business are required, he turns out to be an old friend.

Although I have never knowingly killed a grouse or a partridge, being utterly unfamiliar with the use of shooting irons of any kind, Trollope makes me long for the first of August, that I may tell my man to pack my box and take places in the night mail for Scotland.

And then comes the long hoped-for invitation to spend a week end at Matching Priory; or, it may be that the Duke of Omnium’s great establishment, Gatherum Castle, is to be open to me. Dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, M.P.’s, with the latest news from town, of ministries falling and forming—I have been through it all before. I know the company; when a man enters the room, I know in advance just what turn the gossip will take.

But, above all, the clergy! Was there ever a more wonderful gallery of portraits? Balzac, you will say. I don’t know—perhaps; but beginning with the delightful old Warden, his rich, pompous, but very human son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantley, Bishop Proudie and his shrewish lady, and that Uriah Heep of clergymen, Mr. Slope—it is a wonderful assemblage of living men and women leading everyday lives without romance, almost without incident.

Trollope was the painter, perhaps I should say the photographer, par excellence of his time. He set up his camera and took his pictures from every point of view. Possibly he was not a very great artist, but he was a wonderfully skillful workman. As he says of himself, he was at his writing-table at half-past five in the morning; he required of himself 250 words every quarter of an hour; his motto was nulla dies sine linea—no wet towel around his brow. He went “doggedly” at it, as Dr. Johnson says, and wrote an enormous number of books for a total of over seventy thousand pounds. He looked upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid.

“You are defied to find in Trollope a remark or an action out of keeping with the character concerned. I would give a pound for every such instance found by an objector, if he would give me a penny for every strictly consistent speech or instance I might find in return.” I am quoting from a little book of essays by Street; and it seems to me that he has here put his finger upon one of Trollope’s most remarkable qualities: his absolute faithfulness. He was a realist, if I understand the word, but he did not care to deal much with the disagreeable or the shocking, as those whom we call realists usually do.

His pictures of the clergy, of whom he says that, when he began to write, he really knew very little, delighted some and offended others. An English critic, Hain Friswell, a supreme prig, says they are a disgrace, almost a libel; but the world knows better. On the whole his clergy are a very human lot, with faults and weaknesses just like our own. To my mind Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s lady, is a character worthy of Dickens at his very best. There is not a trace of caricature or exaggeration about her, and the description of her reception is one of the most amusing chapters ever written. In another vein, and very delicate, is the treatment of Mrs. Proudie’s death. The old Bishop feels a certain amount of grief: his mainstay, his lifelong partner has been taken from him; but he remembers that life with her was not always easy; one feels that he will be consoled.

Trollope tells an amusing story of Mrs. Proudie. He was writing one day at the AthenÆum Club when two clergymen entered the room, each with a novel in his hand. Soon they began to abuse what they were reading, and it turned out that each was reading one of his novels. Said one, “Here is that Archdeacon whom we have had in every novel that he has ever written.” “And here,” said the other, “is that old Duke whom he talked about till everyone is tired of him. If I could not invent new characters I would not write novels at all.” Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was impossible for them not to be overheard. Trollope got up and, standing between them, acknowledged himself to be the culprit; and as to Mrs. Proudie, said he, “I’ll go home and kill her before the week is out.”

“The biographical part of literature is what I love most.” After his death in 1882, his son published an autobiography which Trollope had written some years before. Swinburne calls it “exquisitely comical and conscientiously coxcombical.” Whatever this may mean, it is generally thought to have harmed his reputation somewhat. In it he speaks at length of his novels: tells us how and when and where he wrote them; expressing his opinion as dispassionately as if he were discussing the work of an author he had never seen. Painstaking and conscientious he may have been, but in his autobiography he shows no sign of it—on the contrary, he stresses quantity rather than quality.

For this very reason a set—what the publishers call a “definitive edition”—of Trollope will never be published. There is no demand for one. Editions of him in sumptuous binding, gilt-top, with uncut (and unopened) edges, under glass, will not be found in the houses of those who select their books at the same time they make their choice of the equipment of their billiard-room. The immortality of morocco Trollope will never have; but on the open shelves of the man or woman whose leisure hours are spent in their libraries, who know what is best in English fiction, there will be found invariably six or ten of his novels in cloth, by this publisher or that, worn and shapeless from much reading.

There is frequently some discussion as to the sequence in which Trollope’s books should be read. Especially is this true of what his American publishers, Dodd, Mead & Co., call the “Barsetshire” series and the “Parliamentary” series. The novels forming what they term the “Manor House” series have no particular connection with each other. They recommend the following order:—

Good stories all of them; and the enthusiastic Trollopian may wish also to read “The Three Clerks,” in which Chaffanbrass is introduced for the first time; “The Bertrams,” of which Trollope says, “I do not remember ever to have heard even a friend speak well of it”; “Castle Richmond,” which is hard going: “Miss MacKenzie,” in which there is a description of a dinner-party À la Russe, not unworthy of the author of Mrs. Proudie’s reception in “Barchester Towers.”

The list is by no means complete, but by this time we may have enough and not wish to make Lotta Schmidt’s acquaintance, or give a hoot “Why Frau Frohman Raised Her Prices.” I once knew but have forgotten.

Personally, Trollope was the typical Englishman: look at his portrait. He was dogmatic, self-assertive, rather irritable and hard to control, as his superiors in the Post-Office, in which he spent the greater part of his life, well knew; not altogether an amiable character, one would say. His education was by no means first-class, and his English is the English we talk rather than the English we write; but he was able to use it in a way sufficient for his purpose.

Listen to the conclusion of his Autobiography:—

To trust for happiness chiefly to work and books,—to taste the sweet and leave the bitter untasted,—some may call such a scheme of life commonplace; but the most eventful lives are not the happiest—probably few authors have led happier lives than Anthony Trollope.

One final word I am forced to say. Since this awful war broke out, I read him in a spirit of sadness. The England that he knew and loved and described with such pride is gone forever. It will, to the coming generation, seem almost as remote as the England of Elizabeth. The Church will go, the State will change, and the common people will come into their own. The old order of things among the privileged class, much pay for little work, will be reversed. It will be useless to look for entailed estates and a leisure class—for all that made England a delightful retreat to us. If England is to continue great and powerful, as I earnestly hope and believe she is, England must be a better place for the poor and not so enervating for the rich, or both rich and poor are valiantly fighting her battles in vain.