BOOKS.
MR. TROLLOPE'S SHORT TALES.* TROLLOPE'S characteristic power is not shown in anything -like a proportional degree in his shorter tales. It is a kind of power which needs space to develop it. He puts on his moral colours in distinct layers; and though when they are all laid on, they no modify each other as to produce not unfrequently perfect unity of effect, he usually needs for each new touch that he gives to his -characters a good chapter at least of ordinary narrative. Thus, to take a particular instance, the art with which he brings out Archdeacon Grantly's kindly worldliness of heart in relation to his son's marriage in the Last Chronicle of Barset, and how much more worldly be, like most other people, was in practice than in theory, is inimitable of its kind, but it is also incompressible. The flavour of Archdeacon Grantly's worldliness might have been Liven by another artist in a much more condensed form, but then it would have been in a wholly different style of drawing. Mr. Trollope's power is not intensive and concentrated, but extensive and gradual in its approaches. The skill with which he gives us -view after view of his different characters, each looking, at first, as if it were only the old view over again, but proving before long to have a something added, which gives you a sense -of completer knowledge of the character, reminds us of nothing so much as the zigzags of a road terraced up a steep hill-side from which you are constantly getting the same view of a valley repeated again and again, but each time with .some novelty of aspect and additional command of its relation to other neighbouring valleys, in consequence of the added height. This first condition of Mr. Trollope's success as a novelist,—due length of narrative,—is wanting in all his shorter tales, and consequently molly of them are far from remarkable, and one or two in this volume,—like the Last Austrian who Left Venice, the Two Generals, and the Adventures of Fred Pickering, might, except as regards English style, have been by any other laud, and almost by any absolutely unskilled hand. Nothing can be more fade or characterless than these three tales. Mr. Trollope -never succeeds specially in incident, except it be incident in relation to character, and in these three tales there is nothing but caput mortuum of character, something which we will not deny might have grown beneath his skilful hands in a long narrative into interest and significance, but, left as it is, bears to one of his -better studies precisely the same relation which a cutting of stick -stuck into the earth bears to the tree into which it might, under favourable circumstances, grow. We think such poor little bits of 'workmanship as these should scarcely have been used even to pad out a volume of better tales, for they do not deserve to be permanently -connected with so good a novelist's name. Indeed, as regards reputa- tion, it is a question whether Mr. Trollope does well to collect more than a very few indeed of his short tales in a permanent form. -Of those contained in this volume, only Ophelia Gledd,—which has far the most character,—and Lotta Schmidt, which has a poetry of feeling not very common with Mr. Trollope, and possibly the Widow's Mite, in which Mr. Trollope works out a little .question of conscience with a reality of touch, and pertinacity of illustration peculiarly his own, were, to our mind, worth preserving in a permanent form. Father Giles of Ballymoy has no doubt a broad, pleasant humour of its own, which few writers but Mr. Anthony Trollope could have given to it ; but it is rather a good after-dinner anecdote than a tale ; and Malachi Cove, though pleasant reading on account of the vividness with which it brings a lovely bit of cliff scenery before the eye, is more visibly crippled by its brevity, stands more visibly in need of introductory narra- tive and fuller development, than any tale in the book. Mr. Trollope might have made it into a fine and picturesque story. It is a flower snatched so carelessly that the petals are injured and the stalk lost in the snatching. Only the calyx and a few injured leaves are left in the reader's hand.
The Widow's Mite, though not the most artistic nor the most interesting tale in the book, is the completest tale it contains ; for it completely works out the one idea it is written to illustrate, which is not connected with the delineation of character, but with anxieties of conscience. It was written apparently at the time of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, and intended to press home
"
Lotte Schmidt, and Other Storiee. By Anthony Trollope. Landon: Alexander S Vahan, the true moral of the story of the Widow's Mite in the New Testa- ment, and the exceeding difficultyof gaining fairly the blessing which the widow gained. The heroine of the tale is a young English lady of no wealth, in the neighbourhood of Liverpool, who is engaged to an American gentleman of some property, to whom she is to be immediately married. She is painfully anxious, however, before leaving her country, to do something, and convince herself that she has done something, to prove her deep sympathy with her suffering countrymen in Lancashire. She wants to give her widow's mite ; but she cannot see how she who, instead of being a forlorn widow, is supremely happy in her love, and instead of only two mites, has, poor as she is, a hundred pounds to buy her wedding trousseau with, is to cast in anything to the Lancashire Relief Fund which might bear comparison to the two mites which the widow cast into the Treasury. At last, she determines, instead of being married in white, with a bridal veil and the usual bridal finery, to give all the proceeds of this finery, nearly twenty pounds, to the Relief Fund, and be married in her ordinary winter merino dress, and she carries her point with her betrothed, Mr. Frederic F. Frew, of Philadelphia, in spite of his very advanced economical theories against private charity. The first formation of her resolution is admirably described:— She would throw in her two mites, if she did but know where to find them. "I could only do it, in truth," she said to herself, as she rose from her prayers, "by throwing in him. I have got one very great treasure, but I have not got anything else that I care about. After all, it isn't so easy to be a widow with two mites." Then she sat down and thought about it. As to postponing her marriage, that she knew to be in truth quite out of the question. Even if she could bring herself to do it, everybody about her would say that she was mad, and Mr. Frederick F. Frew might not impossibly destroy himself with one of those pretty revolvers which ho sometimes brought out from Liverpool for her to play with. But it was not practicable for her to give up her wedding-clothes? There would be considerable difficulty even in this. As to their having been ordered, that might be overcome by the sacri- fice of some portion of the price. But then her aunt, and even her uncle, would oppose her; her cousins would cover her with ridicule ; in the latter matter she might, however, achieve something of her widowhood ;--and, after all, the loss would fall more upon F. F. Frew than upon herself. She really did not care, for herself, in what clothes she was married, so tbatshe was made his wife. But as regarded him, might it not be disagreeable to him to stand before the altar with a dowdy creature in an old gown ? And then there was one other consideration. Would it not seem that she was throwing in her two mites publicly, before the eyes of all men, as a Pharisee might do it? Would there not be an ostentation in her widowhood ? But as she continued to reflect, she cast this last thought behind her. It might be so said of her, but if such saying were untrue, the offering were made in a widow's spirit, and not in the spirit of a Pharisee, would it not be cowardly to regard what men might say ? Such false accusation would make some part of the, two mites. "I'll go into Liverpool about it on Monday," she said to herself, as she finally tucked the clothes around her.
But perhaps the best touch in the story is the end. When she has, after great difficulty, conquered her lover's and her aunt's and her bridesmaids' prejudices on the subject, and triumphed with regard to the merino dress, and the contribution to the Relief Fund, and when the marriage takes place, instead of missing her finery, no one remembers its absence, and she is half disap- pointed at finding that it turns out no sacrifice at all.
" It has been all very nice," said Mrs. Granger, still sobbing, when Nora went up-stairs to tie on her bonnet before she started. " Only you are going ! "—" Yes, I'm going now, aunt. Dear aunt ! Bat, aunt, I have failed in one thin.--absolutely failed."—" Failed in what, my
darling ? There has been no widow's mite. It is not easy to be a widow with two mites."—" What you have given will be blessed to you and blessed to those who will receive it."—" I hope it may ; but I almost feel that I have been wrong in thinking of it so much. It has cost me nothing. I tell you, aunt, that it is not easy to be a widow with two mites." When Mrs. Granger was alone with her husband after this, the two Miss Fosters having returned to Liverpool under the discreet protection of the two young Grangers, for they had positively refused to travel with no other companion than the strange Amerioan,—she told him all that Nora had said. "And who can tell us," he replied, " that it was not the same with the widow herself ? She threw in all that she had, but who can say that she suffered aught in consequence? It is my belief that all that is given in a right spirit comes book in- stantly, in this world, with interest."—" I wish my coals would come back," said Mrs. Granger.—" Perhaps you have not given them in a right spirit, my dear."
No one works out a little moral problem of this kind with more vivacity and force than Mr. Trollope, and this tale, slightly as it draws upon his powers as an artist, is worth perpetuating, as showing how strongly he can conceive and with how much life he can expound a point of social ethics that has once taken strong hold of him. Those who call Mr. Trollope an immoral novelist do not truly understand him. He sees thoroughly, no doubt, what good there is in weak and even in bad men. But no one grasps more strongly the difference between a man who floats with the tide and a man who is pushing his way upwards to a higher moral k faith. The story of Ophelia Gleddia a very striking study of the differ- ence between the nuances of character constituting a Yankee lady and an English lady, and we only wish she had been the heroine of a long novel, instead of a dwarf tale. Lotto Schmidt is a tale of a dif- ferent class. Mr. Trollope is very susceptible to the different moral atmosphere and effect of different places, and in this tale he has caught the air of Viennese popular life with great delicacy and vigour. But what gives its interest to the tale is its description of the effect produced by a great player on the zither. Mr. Trollope does not often write like this, nor do we think that it is his best style ; but it is remarkable in him :— Reader, did you ever hear the zither? When played, as it is some- times played in Vienna, it combines all the softest notes of the human voice. It sings to you of love, and thou wails to you of disappointed love, till it fills you with a melancholy from which there is no escaping, —from which you never wish to escape. It speaks to you as no other instrument ever speaks, and reveals to you with wonderful eloquence the sadness in which it delights. It produces a luxury of anguish, a fullness of the satisfaction of imaginary woe, a realization of the mysterious delights of romance, which no words can ever thoroughly supply. While the notes are living, while the music is still in the air, the ear comes to covet greedily every atom of tone which the instrument will produce, so that the slightest extraneous sound becomes an offence. The notes sink and sink so low and low, with their soft sad wail of delicious woe, that the listener dreads that something will be lost in the struggle of listening. There seems to come some lethargy on his sense of hearing, which he fears will shut out from his brain the last, lowest, sweetest strain, the very pearl of the music, for which he has been watching with all the intensity of prolonged desire. And then the zither is silent, and there remains a fond memory, together with a deep regret.
We never heard the zither, but " luxury of anguish," and the ether phrases applied by Mr. Trollope to express the greediness of yearning which it excites, seem to describe a slightly voluptuous and epicurean element in its music, to express something self-con- scious in the eager feeding on delicious sadness which it encourages, in short, to indicate a softening and slightly relaxing style of music. And the old musician and Lotta Schmidt herself, who is so much in love with his music as to fall in love with himself, are sketched in conformity with this conception of his style of art, but how cursorily and unsatisfactorily ! Here, again, as in almost all-the other stories of any merit, we feel how much Mr. Trollope loses,—how much of his own most characteristic power he loses, —by not winding out his tale in an extended thread of incident. To take an illustration from flowers, Mr. Trollope's genius is of a standard order, and needs a good long stock to support it ;—the dwarf specimens of his art are by no means favourable ones ; we doubt if he ought ever to consent to produce short tales like these. 'They are not specimens of his best literary strength.
Previous page
