The Facts of Fiction (19 page)

Attach names to them and you have among the bright glittering ones Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli; among the red-hot, glowing ones, Kingsley, George Eliot and Charles Reade; and among those neither bright nor burning, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell—though in
Ruth
she burned as brightly as any of them—and those two untiring and unenterprising historians who posed as novelists, G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth.

Leaving the hair-oil and damask group, and the pamphlet-and-platform party, for a moment, the most considerable artists we meet are George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, the best of the second-best.

George Eliot,
née
Mary Ann Evans, is conspicuous as the novelist of sanity and common sense. If you like the manner of the female preacher and continuation-school teacher you will like George Eliot. She is religious and confident and independent.

Adam Bede,
for instance, is the best protest in all fiction against the Chadband type of Dickens caricature of Nonconformity. Dinah Morris, despite her permanent,
unblinking, Salvationist smile is a living woman, the first of a long line. Indeed, George Eliot's heroines, such as Dorothea from
Middlemarch,
are better drawn than those of any other woman novelist. That was because George Eliot was perfectly unsentimental; she was masculine in mind as well as in the name she assumed. That George Eliot's mind was such a calm, moderate mind, Leslie Stephen has suggested, was due to the calm, moderate Warwickshire countryside in which she was brought up. It may have been. I am doubtful of these geographical explanations. What we can safely say is that the differences between George Eliot and the Brontës are as the differences in their native landscapes.

So far as the present generation is concerned, George Eliot's clerics have aged more rapidly than those of Anthony Trollope. He has come in as she has gone out.

Trollope nearly became a second Jane Austen; but not knowing, only imagining, the world of which he wrote, he was kinder, and so lost the opportunity.

The coral structure of life within the bright glass-case of the novels is the same; and within the limitations of the circumscribing rim their measure of success is very much the same.

Trollope, like his friend Thackeray, faced middle-age with his soul in good, charitable working condition, but slightly battered from ill-usage in youth. And it was not until after middle-age that he wrote his best. Unlike the scream-till-someone-hears-us band of social reformers, who invaded fiction about this time, he used his novels not as a protest against persecution but as a precaution against poverty. And to his unromantic and logical mind the one
was
the other.

He simply wrote the best novels that he could write, and sold them as Scott did his for the highest figure that
he could get. But once the truth got about that he had the acumen of a tradesman as well as the art of an author, everyone forgot the latter in utter disgust at the former. His contemporaries could never quite forgive the penniless, dirty-faced little boy who contrived to make £70,000 by his pen.

Trollope's
Autobiography
is the kind of reminiscent volume that a successful butcher might have written had he suddenly grown perfectly and persuasively articulate. I suppose without doubt it is vulgar, supremely vulgar, this record of a huge horseman riding roughshod over other people's heads.

It is a strangely stunted production: from it is excluded even a glimpse of the worlds of beauty, or passion, or anything higher than ambition. It is the story of a man's backing himself heavily in the race of life and winning. It reminds one of the dream that is embodied in Smiles's
Self-Help,
pleasantly and plentifully come true.

My marriage was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to anyone except my wife and me. It took place at Rotherham in Yorkshire, where her father was the manager of a bank. We were not rich, having about £400 a year on which to live. Many people would say that we were two fools to encounter such poverty together. I can only reply that since that day I have never been without money in my pocket, and that I soon acquired the means of paying what I owed.

The marriage “was like the marriage of other people”—that is the remark of a verger not of a bridegroom. And the rest of the quotation shows a mind as little affected by the sentimentalities of marriage as Jane Austen's, and
as fully aware of the economics. But throughout the
Autobiography
there is one quality even more apparent than its vulgarity. And that is its honesty. Trollope's
Autobiography
says all those things that one suspects other authors of having felt, and left unsaid.

Trollope extracted as much pleasure from the business of success as Arnold Bennett did. Both men were impressed by themselves, and both men loved conveying the impression. There was always a look-first-at-this-picture-and-then-on-that invitation in Trollope's personal writing. This is the diptych:

I remember well, when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler, the headmaster, stopping me in the street, and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and all the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow School was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I.

That was when he was seven, the helpless child of ruined parents. And this is when he was sixty-three; fat, defiant and captain of his fate.

It may interest some if I state that during the last twenty years I have made by literature something near £70,000. As I have said before in these pages, I look upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid. … If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an early paradise; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a £5 note over a card-table—of what matter is that to any reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to
no sorrow. It has been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects—to have the sweet and leave the bitter untasted—that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well.

There is about that passage and, indeed, about the whole of the
Autobiography
the self-satisfied glee of the schoolboy who has managed to break all the rules without being punished.

Trollope, cheating his father's bailiffs at fifteen and living within his income at fifty like a squire, is truly and typically the pattern of a Victorian author, as Fielding or Smollett, tracing the reverse course through life, is of the eighteenth century.

When Trollope left school his contemporaries went to the University and he went into the Post Office. His contemporaries are all forgotten by now, partly no doubt because the life they found there fitted them like a glove and they wanted to do nothing but wear it. The Post Office fitted Trollope like a thumbscrew and he spent years trying to fling it off. He regarded the years spent at St. Martin's-le-Grand merely as a particularly barren patch of the great Sahara that spread across his early life. The truth probably is that they comprised his imaginative Garden of Eden, out of which a river flowed. It must have been there, as inescapably surrounded by the society of his fellows as a monk, that Trollope learned with tears of boredom the comic littleness of man.

It may seem puzzling why Trollope did not write the supreme novel of the Civil Service. And the puzzle is
perhaps most satisfactorily solved by saying that he could not because he disliked it too much. If he had attempted it he would have been looking round the whole time for faces to punch instead of for noses to pull. And pulling clerical noses was what he did to perfection in the Barchester novels. When he tried in
The Three Clerks
to write the novel of the Civil Service he failed as unmistakably as he succeeded in
The Warden.

Indeed, Trollope, after he left the Post Office, may be regarded as the complete novelist, his mind driven back into itself by unhappiness, and with a digested store of humorous observation ready for delivery. All that he needed to begin his writing was a similar restricted scene of society in which to let his little comedy be played. And he found it in Salisbury.

When Trollope took the train to Salisbury, Fortune drove the engine and Mischief rode in the van. “I visited Salisbury,” he wrote, “and whilst wandering there one midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral, I conceived the story of
The Warden,
from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester with its bishops, deans and archdeacons was the central site”; and he added, “I never lived in any cathedral city except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman.”

Of course he had not: “peculiar intimacy” is one of the easiest ways of destroying the capacity for humorous observation. Trollope's real strength lay in the fact that he knew—he was one of those men who can acquire instinct at a glance—the life of clergymen without suffering from the hobbling restriction of knowing the clergymen themselves. In consequence he could openly laugh in their faces, which they enjoyed, and not behind their backs,
which no one would have liked. If Trollope had really lived in a real Barchester he would have been simply the Cathedral Untouchable. As it is he is the greatest layman of ecclesiastical letters. And so it is that Barchester and Barsetshire, the one really convincing rural Ruritania out of many, came into existence out of the imagination and not out of experience. That Barchester
is
convincing, is despite rather than because of Trollope's art as a storyteller. For he
would
adopt the maddening habit of assuring his readers that they were merely fiddling about with fiction, instead of allowing them the illusion that they were being given some miraculous opportunity for handling life: which is the object of every intelligent novelist.

There is, for instance, the heart-breaking opening to
The Warden:

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of—let us call it Barchester. …

That is very much like bursting the bubble before it is blown. And Trollope's activities with a pin are some of the most regrettable pieces of destructive work in fiction. Henry James said of them:

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 the rather vague consideration of form, which is the only canon we have the right to impose upon Trollope … when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and
intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention.

Trollope had other faults. His plots were like haddock lines with rows of hooks on which to hang things—usually comedy—and nothing more. His mind recognised nothing stranger than a curate with a funny face like Mr. Slope. But as a story-teller Trollope can hold up his head and his reader's time with any.

There are other Trollopes than the Puck in the Cathedral Close. In all, Trollope wrote fifty-one novels as well as travel books and biographies. The last years of his life were like those of a smaller and unworried Scott, spent in feverishly paying off debts that did not exist.

Trollope wrote quickly and often badly.
Dr. Wortle's School
is a sudden bright spot of real Trollope amid works that satisfied their purpose the moment they were paid for. Towards the end of his years, Anthony Trollope was merely the vulgarly successful literary merchant taking his revenge out of Life for having kept him short of pocket-money when at school.

Haworth Parsonage in 1840 was absurdly overcrowded with female genius. That bleak house set in a barren landscape was the kindling point of one of the celestial burning-glasses of the imagination. Indeed, so intense is the imaginative quality in the work of Emily and Charlotte that
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
might serve better as the theme for a sonnet than as a subject for criticism. Not only did the novels of the Bronte sisters handle those thoughts that poetry can handle better than prose, but their own lives were planned in the pattern of poetic tragedies. And Charlotte, whose life spanned the abrupt, glowing fragments of the lives of Emily and Anne, was both spectator and actor in the play.

The Brontes mixed life and work so much in one that it is hard to say where the one stops and the other begins. There are few authors for whom the critic has to wait so often and so patiently on the biographer: Mrs. Gaskell is not an incidental luxury but a critical necessity.

Because the Brontes are so manifestly inexplicable, new explanations of their unique genius succeed each other in rapid succession. One of the most common of these is to explain the Brontes in terms of local geography, and attribute the wildness of their minds to the wildness of their native scenery. It is a good explanation, except that it fails to explain how it is that Brontes are not born in every wild and lonely corner of Great Britain.

Haworth Parsonage has undergone that distortion in our minds which occurs when we look at anything too long and too hard. We have come to see it only as the cold
mortuary where the bodies of the Brontes rested briefly in their quick passage to the churchyard, and not as the home where a family of children enjoyed all the ordinary juvenile freedoms of body and imagination.

It is true that Fate in that household seems to have been both hard and in a hurry. There was a door—one would almost say
the
door, for symbolists have set it so large in the foreground of the picture—between the house and the graveyard. And the door opened and shut too often and too soon. In 1821 Mrs. Brontë died and was carried through. In May, 1828, Maria followed her, and a month later her sister, Elizabeth. Then Fate stood off for a space—for twenty years, letting two of this family declare their worth and the third his worthlessness—and then it struck them down, one, two and three.