Trollope Looks Back

Trollope Looks BackAuthor(s): Andrew WrightSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 82-94Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344953 .

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Trollope Looks Back

ANDREW WRIGHT

Trollope is often read as the exemplary novelist of evocation, summoning up a golden age whose roots lie deep in the version of the eighteenth century that is summed up in the phrase "the peace of the Augustans." He is also read as bearing witness to Victorian quiet and disquiet. The second is the correct way to read him, though it is true that he is still regarded even by some of his admirers as embodying, long after the end of such peacefulness as the eighteenth century enjoyed, the sense of order, harmony, and acceptance which was once supposed to have characterized that era. But to take Trollope in this spirit is to misconceive his intention and to underestimate his achievement; and it would be gratuitous to recall such misreadings now were it not for a further complication, suggested by the Simon Raven adaptation of the Palliser novels for the BBC in 1974, produced by Martin Lisemore, elaborately mounted, and act- ed with much style by Roland Culver as the old Duke of Omnium, Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora, Barry Justice as Burgo Fitzgerald, Philip Latham as Plantagenet Palliser, Donal McCann as Phineas Finn, Barbara Murray as Madame Max Goesler, and Sarah Badel as Lizzie Eustace. The cause for the dis- tortion cannot be assigned to Mr. Raven or Mr. Lisemore or the BBC so much, perhaps, as to the altered circumstances of England in the 1970s. Nor has the television series been alone in inviting misconstruction. There is also Angela Thirkell, whose modest contribution to the gaiety of nations commencing more than a generation ago consists in unabashedly nostalgic recreations of Barsetshire that she herself insisted to be departures from Trollope. To read Trollope in the spirit of Angela Thirkell is to be guilty of an anachronism which she herself scorned. In other words, present-day readers of Trollope, even if they do not make the mistake of transposing him into the eighteenth century, are liable to be charmed into viewing the stuff of his novels in narrow retrospect, simply because they deal with a past that is never to be recaptured. This is the antiquarian way of reading Trollope, and it has a certain appeal; but it does him an injustice analogous to that of reading Pride and Prejudice and Emma as the achievements of gentle Jane.

For no other major Victorian novelist can be said to have been so centered in contemporaneity. From first to last Trollope took the materials out of the lives he led-in Ireland, in the west country of England, in London, in transit-and fashioned of them the fictions which a century later grant opportunity for looking back because they deal with an era now so definitively bygone. Yet for the most part Trollope wrote not of the past but of the present: the early and late



ANDREW WRIGHT TROLLOPE LOOKS BACK

Irish novels, the Chronicles of Barsetshire, the Palliser series, and all but one of the other works variously classified by Michael Sadleir as Novels of Man- ners, Social Satires, Irish, Australian, Romantic, Psychological, and Fantastic, came hot onto the paper from the day-to-day experience of Anthony Trollope, transfigured to be sure by the fantasizing impulse to which he gives acknowl- edgment in the Autobiography; but the rendition, or transposition, is of the present. No wonder that Henry James found cause for exasperation at the achievement of Trollope: the "complete appreciation of reality" of the funer- ary piece' became narrowed to "a complete appreciation of the usual" when the essay was revised for inclusion in Partial Portraits because James obviously found increasingly distasteful the notion that the novelist eschew the historian's vocation. Thus it is inconceivable that Isabel Archer's namesake and fel- low-countrywoman, Isabel Boncassen of The Duke's Children, should affront her destiny (James read The Duke's Children while he was writing The Portrait of a Lady2). Truly enough-and correctly enough-Isabel Boncassen wonders how she will fare as the wife to the heir of the dukedom of Omnium. But there is no cultural gap that cannot be closed, no sense of national obstacle, beyond the temporary worry on the part of Trollope's Isabel that she may not be readily accepted by the Pallisers and their noble friends: she, whose grand- father was a laborer on the New York docks, wonders no more than that, and she need not. It is as if Isabel Archer's only concern were whether Lord War- burton's sisters should think well enough of her. For Isabel Boncassen, the questions of being and becoming oneself, which so bedevil Isabel Archer, do not exist. This is another way of saying that Isabel Archer is an historic figure. Her past has a causal relationship to the present: the Albany of her upbringing with its cramped and ignorant and touching dreams, even the poverty that circumscribed those dreams, relate portentously to the Isabel who arrives at Gardencourt. But when Isabel Boncassen makes her appearance in London society, she is fully what she is already. She is untrammeled by her past, for what she was born into does not limit the fullness of her apprehension and response; her sense of herself is not under threat. And indeed she is not so splendid a fictional creation as is her Jamesian counterpart, but neither is she the heroine of The Duke's Children. The point is that the sense of a past that deter- mines or shapes the present,is nonexistent in Trollope. Even Plantagenet Palli- ser has no father-he inherits the dukedom from his scapegrace uncle; and Lady Glencora is equally free of parental circumstance. Always in Trollope the focus is on the present.

Nonetheless, Trollope's uses of the past throw light on his realizations of the present. As an omnivorous and not undiscriminating reader, he can surely be described as having an attitude toward the relationship of history to culture: he rejected the past, or (to put in other terms) he domesticated the past in ways

1Century Magazine, 26 (1883), 386. 2 See John Halperin, "Trollope, James, and the International Theme," Yearbook of English Studies, 7 (1977),

141.

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that throw light on his greatest achievements. His range of acquaintance with literary works of earlier times-and, more importantly, his responses to what he read-illuminate the playful antiquarianism of Barchester Towers, the ironi- cal nostalgia of Doctor Thorne; they help show why The Eustace Diamonds, for all that it is avowedly formed on the example of Vanity Fair, lacks the historical dimension which Thackeray provides in the Waterloo chapters; so also the thinness of the politics, the paucity of historical speculation, in the Palliser series represents Trollope's sense of the present, which, if it is a limitation, is also his glory.

To be sure, one of the strengths of Trollope is his knowledge of his own capacities: he could look at himself unsparingly and acknowledge salient defi- ciency. Having done so, he could abstain from what he was unable to perform -and could perform all the better elsewhere. Thus early in his career he learned that he had little historical imagination. La Vendee (1850), his single effort in a notoriously prolific career at the writing of an historical novel, he knew to be a failure artistically as well as financially. In the Autobiography, he acknowledges as much, and shows that he knows why: "the facts of the present time came more within the limits of my powers of storytelling than those of past years." 3 Nor did that speculative treatise, The New Zealander-written in 1855-56 but rejected by his publisher with some vehemence-make possible any sort of confidence in the prophetic role which is traditionally that of the historian.4 Looking before and after was never to be Trollope's strong suit, though he did make a feeble contribution to thanatology in The Fixed Period (1882), a novel about universal euthanasia set in 1980; but the center of interest is not in the future except as it may provide a more salubrious climate for "the aboli- tion of the miseries, weakness and faineant imbecility of old age, by the pre- arranged ceasing to live of those who would otherwise become old." 5 There are also the dutifully compiled but significantly routine histories in the travel books, and these confirm what can be amply demonstrated elsewhere-that Trollope was more contained by his own time than were others of his level of importance.6

3 Autobiography, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 81.

4 The long-unpublished New Zealander, written when Trollope was forty (and after the limited success of The Warden) is a response to Macaulay's apocalyptic prophecy that sooner or later a visitor from New Zealand would sketch the ruins of St. Paul's from a broken arch of London bridge. Necessarily, therefore, The New Zealander concerns itself with historical speculation-but, characteristically, it is almost anti- historical and anti-prophetic: it is a diatribe against hypocritical high-mindedness among politicians and churchmen, excessive partisanship in Parliament; a plea for the middle way in political belief; a celebration of the virtue of individual honesty and hard work; a sometimes worried and occasionally indignant sketch of the status quo-but a status quo susceptible of being lived with and improved on.

5 The Fixed Period (London, 1882), I, 4. 6 This fact is faced up to by the editors of the 1967 edition of Australia: Trollope's "passion for politics

declares itself unmistakably . . . and accounts for much of the interest the book retains for the modern reader." The editors acknowledge (as does Trollope himself) the inaccuracies of historical fact in the book, claiming that its principal value lies in the record made by an intelligent and indubitably tireless traveller a

century ago. "The qualities that give it whatever interest and usefulness it now retains derive not from

any deep intuitive sense of hidden social and psychological forces, but from a basically sensible, observant, realistic view of Australian society as it appeared on the surface at a particular point in time" (P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce, eds., Australia [Sydney: University of Queensland Press, 1967], pp. 20, 39.

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It is true that in his youth Trollope wrote a prospectus, or some notes toward, a history of world literature-vast in scope, as wide-ranging as his father's sadly grandiose Encyclopaedia Ecclesiastica. Trollope was twenty-five or not much older when this scheme was put on paper, and it never got written.7 For the most part, however, Trollope stuck to his last, which was to depict a version of the present with a sense of immediacy that made him one of the most popular novelists of his day. But he knew what he was missing. He knew that

Thackeray could do what he could not: so he says in his Thackeray (1879), and he declared Henry Esmond to be the greatest of all novels. In fact, Trol-

lope was as incapable of writing historical fiction as Jane Austen was of writing the novel of intrigue proposed to her by James Stanier Clarke, Librarian to the Prince Regent.

In the present essay I have chosen to focus for the most part on Trollope's response to the eighteenth century, not simply on account of the contributions of Edward Bloom to our understanding of that time but because Trollope's view of the period is hardly different from his view of any other except his own, and also because the rise of the novel, beginning with Defoe, grants opportunity to display Trollope's responses to the genre which, after all, claimed his chief attention.

Trollope read widely in the eighteenth century and with documented pleasure. His library contained a large representation of eighteenth-century authors, all that a Victorian gentleman may be presumed to have read, in the standard editions of English literature, including John Bell's Poets of Great Britain (124 vols., 1782), Mrs. Inchbald's British Theatre (25 vols., 1808), Mrs. Bar- bauld's British Novels (50 vols., 1810). Moreover, he owned sets or separate titles representing all the major and many of the minor writers from Defoe to Jane Austen. Nor did he confine his reading to works in his own library. Just as he confessed that there were some books in his library which represented intentions before which he ultimately quailed,8 such as a Magyar grammar and twenty volumes of U.S. Congressional debates, he was a borrower on the usual Victorian scale: according to Lucy Poate Stebbins and Richard Poate Steb- bins, "A regular supply of books from Mudie's lending library accompanied him wherever he went." 9 As a reader of eighteenth-century works, Trollope was devoted, catholic, and thoughtful-a fact demonstrable not only in the many allusions in the novels, occasional essays, and reviews, but also in other records that are worth weighing in this connection. And the fact that Trollope re- tained to the end of his life an active interest in eighteenth-century literature is conclusively though fragmentarily demonstrated in the record of the reading aloud in the Trollope household which N. John Hall has recently published. The Seasons was read aloud in February of 1877 (sandwiched between Childe

7 See N. John Hall, "An Unpublished Trollope Manuscript on a Proposed History of World Literature," NCF, 29 (1974), 208.

8 In "The Migration of a Library," Pall Mall Gazette, 17 September 1880, 11. 9 The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 261.

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Harold's Pilgrimage, to which January was mainly devoted, and The Revolt of Islam, which occupied the whole of March); in December of 1878, he turned to The Deserted Village, The Traveller, and Retaliation; in the following month Cowper succeeded Goldsmith, as Trollope took up The Task; and several months in 1877 and 1878 were given over to Pope's Odyssey and "summer & autumn" of the latter year to Pope's Iliad.l0

To examine the responses of Trollope to eighteenth-century authors is to find, however, a resistance on his part to put himself in the place of these writers, a reluctance to build the bridge of sympathy and intelligence which together form the historical imagination: Trollope could wax combative if chal- lenged to think in terms that the eighteenth century found comfortable. So when as a hobbledehoy of eighteen he read Burke's On the Sublime and the Beautiful, he annotated a copy of the book with a contrariety intended to explode the assumptions and arguments of the great man." The notion of a sensus communis, so elaborately rehearsed by Burke in the "Introduction on Taste" is rejected by Trollope with an aggressiveness that is obviously founded on a confidence in his own sense of the way taste works, a sense favoring vari- ety, even idiosyncracy, as validating instruments: Trollope was a child of Romanticism, having been born in the year of Waterloo; and from a lumi- nously (not to say ludicrously) Romantic mother and a darkly (even Gothi- cally) Romantic father learned to drink the draughts of apostasy-such that, even at eighteen and four years before the beginning of the reign of the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent that was to give the century its most characterizing epithet, Trollope was preparing himself to be a Victorian.

So he rejects the sensus communis not deliberately but dogmatically. To Burke's argument, "All men are agreed to call vinegar sour, honey sweet and aloes bitter," Trollope counters: "There are those to whom the taste of vinegar is not unpleasant, & there [are] those to whom honey is unpleasant." There is more in the same vein in the margin of Trollope's Burke: "Salt & sugar are most palatable, generally so but not universally so, & so would be a good proof of an argument directly contrary to Mr. Burks." And: "There are those who think a winters storm more majestic & more Beautifull than the most beautifull sunset-& which each separate person may prefer depends on the disposition & mind of that person." 12

Nor could Trollope make the leap that would enable him to understand that aspect of eighteenth-century psychology that Burke denominates "a state of indifference." The energy that flows through his novels and to which Trollope refers in the Autobiography in the notorious comparison of the writer to other workmen ("To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting" [121]):

10 N. John Hall, "Trollope Reading Aloud: An Unpublished Record," N&Q, 22 (1975), 117-18. 11 The annotations have been fully transcribed by Susan L. Humphreys in "Trollope on the Sublime and the

Beautiful," NCF, 33 (1978), 194-214. 12 Humphreys, pp. 202-03; Ms. Humphreys has wisely decided not to correct Trollope's misspellings.

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this energy is readily elicited by Burke's sketch of the "state of indifference."

Trollope's response is: "Can a person be in a middle state, neither suffering pain or enjoying pleasure. if he can-they are entirely distinct-but if he cannot (which I think is the case; as existence itself is a pleasure, when we are suffering no pain-) then I think they depend on one another." Again: "Is it not a pleasure to live, breathe, love & be loved-to exert the faculty of reason, to feel ourselves Lords of Gods earth &c?" Again: "Existence is pleasure while unsullied by pain." Again: "Mere existence is pleasure." 13

A third impossibility for Trollope was that of comprehending in any but negative terms the eighteenth-century notions of the Great Chain of Being, which drags its slow length through Burke: "The three principal links in this chain are sympathy, imitation, and ambition." To this Trollope responds: "Why not avarice, vanity & others." 14 And when Burke makes his famous sally: "[L]et it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and pro- claim the triumph of the real sympathy," Trollope replies with a sense of exasperation founded not on aesthetic preference but on a congeries of supposi- tions about man and society distinctly of his century rather than that of Burke: "Sympathy! It would be no sympathy, it would be sympathy, if any were too much shocked-to enjoy the play. but most would rush to see the execution from a love of seeing death & a horrid sight. but surely this is not sympathy." 15

Trollope's 1874 Catalogue of His Books lists Burke's Works in eight volumes. There is a separate listing for On the Sublime and the Beautiful. These titles also appear in the earlier Waltham House Catalogue and so survived the win- nowing process that took place when Trollope moved from Waltham Cross to Montagu Square. Accordingly there is bibliographical evidence to support the contention that Trollope could give shelf space to and yet continue to resist what he could not accommodate himself to intellectually.

Trollope's quarrel with the century that preceded his own is nowhere more evident than in the Commonplace Book, the volumes of which covering the years 1835-40 are preserved in the Beinecke Library at Yale.16 Not for Trollope the God of the Essay on Man, not for Trollope Pope's elegant deployment of commonplaces. He sees the philosophy of that poem wholly from the view- point of a nineteenth-century young man: Pope is a "sort of metaphysical Cal- vinist-a rational predestinarian." Indeed there is not a single eighteenth- century idea to which Trollope can subscribe. So strongly condemnatory is he, in fact, that he takes himself to task for his inclination to "disagree-to cavil- to oppose-to attack-to condemn-countermine-& argue." But he forgives himself so far as Pope's poem is concerned: "My excuse in allowing this spirit

13 Humphreys, pp. 207, 209. 14 Humphreys, p. 210.

'5 Humphreys, p. 211. 18 They have been printed with commentary by N. John Hall in NCF, 91 (1976), 15-25.

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to preponderate in recalling Pope's essay is certainly though, merely the love of my own species."

Trollope's efforts to write literary criticism came to little, and are rather em- barrassing in themselves-except when he was addressing a text without the albatross of theory: he was a limited but illuminating practical critic; but when he tried to take the long view the result was deplorable. "English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement," the lecture he first delivered in 1870 in

Edinburgh, and which he repeated elsewhere with variations, is a case in point, almost incredibly banal in its approach to the larger purposes of fiction, re- lieved only here and there by sharply specific comment. In the Autobiography, written between October 1875 and the end of April 1876, Trollope speaks of having undertaken to write a history of prose fiction "nearly twenty years since" (215). The introductory pages which Michael Sadleir publishes as Appendix III of his Trollope: A Commentary belong to the middle 1860s but are strongly retrospective. What is not always noticed about this manuscript, which is of great interest as belonging to this period, is that most of it appears word for word in the Autobiography. Moreover, a large section of it appears in "English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement." It makes a fourth appearance in an essay published in 1879, "Novel Reading: Dickens and Thacker- ay." 7 Evidently, therefore, Trollope did not even in the most productive decades of his career subject the theory of his art to radical scrutiny-or, if he did, he remained content with his first formulations. I prefer to think that these iterations and reiterations of conventional pieties about the function of the novel are a sign of his refusal to think in theoretical terms. If I am right, the limitations of the critic account for certain of his practices as a novelist. Incapa- ble of imagining except in terms of incident and of character as closely observed, Trollope refused himself the temptations, if they ever existed, of work- ing out a rationale for the writing of fiction.ls Correspondingly he avoided (with the dim exception already noted) the dimension that history grants to a certain kind of genius. Personal predilection notwithstanding, Trollope realized that in order to write on the subject of prose fiction, even though the chief purpose would be "to vindicate my own profession as a novelist," he would have to "describe how it had come to pass that the English novels of the present day have become what they are." He flinched at the task. Not that he was un- interested in the dignity of his calling; but in defending the writing of novels against the charge that they might lead the young astray, he reveals his own anti-historical bias. Hence even the worthy novels of the eighteenth century, except for those of Richardson, are inappropriate because too crude and mis- leading for the readers of the 1860s and 1870s.

In "English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement," Trollope writes more 17 Nineteenth Century, 5 (1879), 24-43. 18 See Andrew Wright, "Anthony Trollope as a Reader," in Two English Novelists (Los Angeles: Clark Library,

1975), p. 59, from which I have borrowed and adapted a couple of sentences for the present essay.

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extensively of his eighteenth-century forebears than in the fragment printed in Sadleir or in the Autobiography or in "Novel Reading." Behind the lecture is, unsurprisingly, a view of the novelists of the eighteenth century founded on the conviction that the whole purpose of novel-reading is lost when novels concern themselves with characters and manners not our own, or not readily convertible into terms of present-day manners and morals. Accordingly, the praise of Thackeray, such that his novels are placed on a pinnacle, derives from a sense of Thackeray's ability to represent young men and women of the present day, whereas the genius of Dickens is disfigured by the tendency to make his characters "more than humanly grotesque." 19 All novelists of the eighteenth century, some of them sufficiently talented to deserve praise, are nonetheless outmoded just because they do not think as we do. Of Robinson Cru- soe's popularity over a period of a century and a half, Trollope takes due note; but the others of Defoe's novels he dismisses as offensive (in "Novel Reading," he calls Robinson Crusoe an "accident" [29]). Richardson is praised for "long-drawn pathos" and Fielding for "constructive skill." But Trollope argues that the works of even these writers are-obsolete. "It is customary in literary conversation to presume that men are acquainted with their works. But we no longer find them lying about the houses of our friends. They stand on the shelves of our libraries, and people think that they have read them. They describe coarse things in coarse language, and are not in accordance with the tastes or with the sympathies of the age" (101). Fielding's characters are accurately enough drawn, but their very remoteness from the manners of the present day renders them decreasingly interesting as characters. As for Lovelace, Trollope doubts the possibility of the existence of such a fiend, even a hundred years ago. The conclusion is obvious: "'Tom Jones' and 'Clarissa' will gradually be banished from our ordinary home bookshelves, as 'Euphues' and 'Arcadia' have been banished before them" (102).20 Smollett and Sterne get shorter shrift: Smollett is a coarser Fielding, and Tristram Shandy (Trollope did not even bother to mention Sterne at every delivery of this lecture) is dismissed in a remark written in Trollope's hand in Copy D of the lecture: "Sterne's

Is "English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement," in Morris L. Parrish, ed., Four Lectures (London, 1902), p. 129.

20 Earlier, in The New Zealander, Trollope wrote thus about Richardson and Fielding: "Richardson clearly knew nothing of the world of which he was writing. Had he been describing the loves of a true Mohametan with a houri in the seventh heaven, he could not have been less near the mark of reality than he has been with his English heroes and heroines" (p. 158). Even in abridged form Trollope found Clarissa "awkward and tedious"-so he said in a letter to E. S. Dallas, who published an abridgement in 1868, and Trollope was equally plain in his disapproval in the review he wrote of this version in Saint Paul's (3 [1868], 163-72; Letters, pp. 226-27). In 1879, in "Novel Reading," Trollope is grudging: of Clarissa he says: "the tone is too melancholy, and is played too exclusively on a single string for the taste of a less patient age" (p. 29). In The Duke's Children Richardson appears in a context that is intended to raise a smile: Lord Silver- bridge, having spoken to his father for the second time about marrying Isabel Boncassen and having been told once again that the permission will not be forthcoming, reads (a little desultorily, it is to be feared) Clarissa "in conformity with his father's advice" (World's Classics edition, II, 272). In The New Zealander, he says: "Fielding, though the first of caricaturists, was but a caricaturist. We do not quite believe in the Lady Boobys, and scarcely put full trust in the Squire Westerns. Squire Western and Allworthy could hardly have lived together, and, had they done so, Tom Jones, Sophia, and Blifil would not have been the product of their joint efforts at education" (pp. 157-58).

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Tristram Shandy ... the undoubted wit, and doubtful pathos, offer no adequate compensation for the obscenity" (136). The Gothic novelists are dismissed as superseded and unread. (On a blank leaf at the end of the third volume of his own copy of The Monk, Trollope wrote: "This is so bad, that nothing ever could have been worse;-and yet the book had a great success! There is no feeling of poetry in it. Everything is pretended, made up, and cold. We are obliged to suppose that its charm consisted in its indecency,-which in itself would not have been much; but is enhanced by being the indecency of a monk." The note is dated March 9, 1869.21 Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen are accounted true to life, Jane Austen being clearly the superior; but Trol- lope's remarks here are mere prelude to his extensive treatment of Scott, whom he regards as marking a watershed in the development of the novel, because Scott wrote about what is recognizable. In all his praise of Scott in this lecture Trollope never employs the word "history," let alone "historical novel." He applauds Scott's great scenes, he provides a catalogue of the great heroes and heroines; but even Trollope finds Scott disquietingly deficient in the ability to depict what he calls "the every-day doings of life" (116). Truly, Trollope's criticism here, as much by the omissions as by what he says, reveals more about the critic than about Scott.

Scott's work became a touchstone to Trollope when writing of others. "It is certain," Bradford Booth says, "that Trollope read the major Scott novels at least twice in the years of his maturity," and, in his study of Trollope's notes on Scott, Booth transcribes the verdicts written in 1873 by Trollope on his two favorite Scott novels, Old Mortality and Ivanhoe.22 What draws the attention here is an absence of any interest on Trollope's part in Scott's effort to recap- ture the past. All the praise is for characterization and scene-though even of these aspects of the novels it is not unstinted. Thus he finds the love passages between Henry Morton and Edith Bellenden to be wooden, and the second half of Ivanhoe unequal to the first half. But he never weighs the power of Scott's historical imagination, never considers whether as historical fictions these works succeed or fail. But he does say something in these notes about history, and it is revealing. Of the historical aspect of Old Mortality, Trollope writes:

He dwells on the history of the times, and on the circumstances leading to and consequent on the battles that were fought with a weary perseverance that has often led, I think, to much skipping. Now I hold it to be a convincing sign of a good novel that it takes long in the reading,-that the reader finds that with due attention to the story he can hardly skip. Old Mortality bears much skipping. (226)

What draws Trollope in Scott is the brilliance of certain characterizing epi- sodes: "Balfour's first meeting with Morton when he wrestles with Bothwell at the Niel Blanes Howff; the subsequent sterner encounter when he slays the

21 NCF, 4 (1949), 167. 22 "Trollope on Scott: Some Unpublished Notes," NCF, 5 (1950), 223-30.

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royally descended sergeant at Drumclog,-one of the grandest scenes in all Scott's novels; the outpourings of Habbakuk Mucklewrath, and the torturing of Macbriar, and finally the scene between Burley and Morton in the cave." And in Ivanhoe there is "liveliness of motion, an audacity of incident, a fresh- ness in the painting of nature, and an aptness in the handling of big names and big things, which gives to the work a power of delighting greater as I think than belongs to any other novel in the English language." There follows a list of praiseworthy scenes by which he estimates the quality of Old Mor- tality. In short, so far as Trollope is concerned, Scott may as well have been any sort of novelist; his historical interests and efforts are to Trollope adventitious and even uninteresting. After what one has read of Trollope's skipping in Old Mortality, one is able to understand the better the comment he makes in a letter to Mary Holmes:

I read Scotts novels . .. from time to time and marvel at the power of storytelling, at the infinite imagination, and 20-horse-power of vivacity-But there is an infinity of padding, and a great amount of very lax work. Taking them through I regard Ivanhoe and Old Mortality as the best. But he never wrote anything, in my mind, as good as Esmonde.23

About the historicity of Ivanhoe, in fact, Trollope cared little, though he loved the book. In a letter to a Miss Badham he says:

They say that historical novels do not at present pay. They mean that the taste of readers is against them;-which is true unless the historical novel be specially good. A new Ivanhoe would be acceptable. But accuracy in a novel is by no means the thing needed. Is Ivanhoe accurate? I doubt whether Scott prepared himself by reading many memoirs of John's reign. But he had the peculiar gift which made an historical novel palatable to readers.24

The complement to the taste for melodrama nourished by Scott, perhaps a paradoxical complement, is the taste for domestic exchange. And here is where Trollope's admiration for Jane Austen is relevant, for Jane Austen herself is very far from being able to do the big bow-wow strain: she simply transfers it, when needed, to the drawing room, as the confrontation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet so triumphantly indicates. It is noteworthy that in The New Zealander Trollope puts Jane Austen in the unusual company of Pepys, that most illustrious of all observers of the eccentric in the daily round; and the characters mentioned by him in a short para- graph on Jane Austen-Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine, the Bertrams, and the Crawfords-are all of them memorable because they are inordinate (158; in "English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement," Trollope singles out the letters of Mr. Collins for special praise [105]). And in the

23 8 July 1875, Letters, ed. Bradford A. Booth (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 342. 24 9 May 1881, Letters, p. 454.

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critique he wrote on the endpapers of his copy of Emma, Trollope calls the heroine "tedious," and declares the Knightleys and the Westons to be "simply sticks," but has praise for the eccentric Mrs. Elton and Miss Bates.25

Henry Esmond is an important document in the case, both because it is laid in the eighteenth century, and because of its first place, as has been observed, in Trollope's heart. At the age of nineteen-so he says in the Autobiography-"I had already made up my mind that Pride and Prejudice was the best novel in the English language,-a palm which I only partially withdrew after a second reading of Ivanhoe, and did not completely bestow elsewhere until Esmond was written." Later he says: "I myself regard Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language, basing that judgment upon the excellence of the language, on the clear individuality of its characters, on the truth of its delinea- tions in regard to the time selected, and on its great pathos." Taking this remark together with what he says about Esmond's historical accuracy, I think we must account Trollope's third reason for admiring the novel not as a tribute to

Thackeray's historical imagination but to his capacity for verisimilitude. This is reinforced when Trollope gives special praise to one of the scenes in the novel, that in which "Lady Castlewood induces the Duke of Hamilton to think that his nuptials with Beatrice will be honoured if Colonel Esmond will give away the bride" (41, 186). And in Trollope's English Men of Letters volume on Thackeray there is ample treatment of Esmond, including an appreciation of Thackeray's setting of his tale in the early eighteenth century.

To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that which he had made his own, but from that which belonged to the time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and to create in it person- ages that were peculiarly concerned with the period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of expression then prevalent.26

Not a word is said about accuracy of historical setting, or the purposes Thackeray may have had in mind in laying his story in an earlier time: all Trollope's assess- ment has to do with the criterion of credibility, especially at the level of spoken language:

When we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we . . . catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had been written natural- ly-though not natural to the middle of the nineteenth century. (126)

25 Bradford A. Booth, "Trollope on Emma: An Unpublished Note," NCF, 4 (1949), 246. 26 Thackeray (London, 1879), p. 124.

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Dickens records, through the character of David Copperfield, a passion for the

eighteenth-century novel that finds no counterpart in the work of Trollope. Thackeray waxed nostalgic about the time when novelists could write with the candor of a Fielding. Meredith rewrote Tom Jones in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. But toward his eighteenth-century forebears Trollope was reluctant. Taken together with his disinclination or incapacity to think in historical terms, this fact makes possible an understanding of his art in two related ways: first, his narrative management, replete with the notable and even notorious inter-

positions, is unilateral and unfettered, and indeed Trollope abstains from var- ious autobiographical methods employed by Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne. He is never magisterial in the manner of Fielding. This is not to say that he did not learn anything from the eighteenth century: logic and common sense forbid such wild surmise. On the other hand, his standoffishness is surely significant. Having rejected the examples set by his predecessors, he escapes their

tyranny. And there is a second, possibly more important, inference to be drawn from Trollope's disinclination to model himself on those of earlier genera- tions. Trollope's sense of the present was so strong as to make his novels con-

temporary documents rather than excursions in retrospect. Trollope's readers absorbed his books as they were issued not in order to look at the past through rose-colored spectacles, but as these works seemed to bear witness to the way they lived then. Trollope's contemporaries read him as-a contemporary. It is

only we latter-day readers of his fictions who mistake his sense of the present for a sense of the past. It is true that Trollope was a special kind of witness, irradiating the present with the daydreams that were the core of his inspiration and the secret of his energy; but Trollope was inescapably, and in a special way, a man of his own time.

It would be wrong, however, to stop with the negative case-the case that

Trollope, incapable of stretching to the historical dimension, is diminished by focusing on the immediate. And it would be even more wrong to conclude, as some have done, that Trollope eagerly or complacently accepted things as they were, that he managed to embrace the bundle of contradictions now la- belled "Victorianism." Trollope stood in an often uneasy relationship to his time. Can the reader of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Trollope's first novel, believe that there is serene or even troubled acceptance on the author's part of the English hegemony in Ireland? Or that the self-consequential (though not

unlikeable) spendthrift, Squire Gresham of Doctor Thorne, is presented by Trollope as exemplary of a class that ought to be preserved? Or that the society depicted in The Way We Live Now, desperate in its venality, is the best of all

possible worlds? Or that the mendacious old father in Mr. Scarborough's Fam-

ily should be regarded as a model? To raise such questions is to make clear that Trollope was sharply and adversely critical from the beginning to the end of his career. Trollope shows that the middle decades of Victoria's reign were full but anxious, variegated but also in some senses impenetrable; that they were cumbersome, power-hungry, and style-ridden. The achievement of Trol-

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lope is so splendid that, the ground having been cleared by an understanding of his attitude to history, we can recognize it the better for what it really is. If it is true, as J. H. Buckley has argued, that "the idea of history dominated the intellectual life of the nineteenth century," that there was necessarily the

preoccupation with change, with process, with movement,27 Trollope stands apart from many though not all of his contemporaries in his effort to make order not historically but in another way: Barsetshire, though it bears resem- blances to actual counties in the west of England, is explicitly "his own crea- ture," as P. D. Edwards so precisely insists;28 Parliament is "a form of theatre," as Lowry Pei says;29 and London is the creation of Trollope's vision at least as muich as the metropolis in which he walked and worked and dwelt.30 The root of Trollope's greatness goes straight down to the playwrights of the Jacobean efflorescence, whom he much admired. The presentments are so immediate, so complete, and so convincing, as to bring the readers of these latter years of the 1970s into a world as full as that of Ben Jonson. It is a world, however, that we dialectical-minded readers of today may resist just because it is-to use Lionel Trilling's word in Sincerity and Authenticity-categorical. In a dis- cussion of that book, Trilling talked of the dialectical and the categorical modes, and he denied that they are contradictory, because each depends on the standpoint from which one views phenomena.31 And when Trilling described the categorical mode he spoke of the "sense that we may have, that we must sometimes force ourselves to have, that we are as we are and that we have a fate, a destiny, our own actuality. We are left with the person we really are and we are not to think of future developments. We are not to think of the exculpa- tions of causalities. In this way we can perhaps accept ourselves as we are; and . . . there is a.kind of wonderful actuality about that kind of realization of oneself" (89). Such, I should urge, is the secret-if there is a secret-of the hold which Trollope can obtain on his readers.

27 "Victorian England: The Self-Conscious Society," in Josef L. Altholz, ed., The Mind and Art of Victorian England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 5.

28 In Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (London: Harvester, 1978), p. 9. 29 In "Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels: The Conquest of Separateness" (Diss., Stanford, 1975), chapter 3. 30 It is desirable to go beyond the game of identifying the fictional characters in the Palliser novels with

actual persons (Daubeny with Disraeli, Gresham with Gladstone-these two admitted by Trollope himself, in fact, to have been so modelled "as to their particular tenets" in a letter to Mary Holmes [15 June 1876, Letters, p. 355], Turnbull with Bright, Mildmay with Lord John Russell, de Terrier with Lord Derby, Brock with Palmerston, and so forth). Likewise it is probably unnecessary to breathe on the embers of that moribund controversy centering on whether Trollope is interested in politics, and whether the Palliser novels can be regarded as political. They are or are not political, depending on how widely the term is understood: Roy Hattersley, to take a recent example, is right to say: "Strictly speaking the 'Palliser Novels' are not political at all. Politics is essentially about issues, the one thing Trollope does not and perhaps cannot provide" ("Trollope's Love Affair with Politics," Observer, 20 January 1974, p. 29); and John Halperin is not wrong to insist that the novels are political because he defines politics as the process of negotiation between people in private as well as public life (Trollope and Politics [London: Macmillan, 1977], passim). In fact, to be caught in this issue is to run the risk of failing to meet Trollope on his own ground.

Late in 1880 Chapman and Hall published The Life of Cicero, by Trollope. In the following February Punch published a cartoon by Linley Sambourne (5 February 1881, p. 58), in which Trollope is shown to have completed the transformation of the bust of Cicero into-a nineteenth-century gentleman!

31 Salmagundi (Spring 1978), p. 88.

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