The Infinite Capacity
MR. WALPOLE is just the man to write on Anthony Trollope. He is himself a professional, painstaking craftsman with no highfalutin notions about the hieratic powers of the novelist's art. At the same time he has that right nicety of perception which makes each one of his novels a distinct and separate achievement, full of sensitive character-study and an intuitive sense of detail. One can picture him, after a bout of hard work, taking a busman's holiday to sit beside Trollope and watch him drive those sturdy three-volume tales which are still rumbling along the highway of English letters. And how Mr. Walpole must enjoy these moments, particularly when he finds some choice scene or character after his own heart and manner.
Think, for instance, of that masterpiece of caricature, where the Warden, Mr. Harding, when confronted by the uncom- fortable things of life, the sordid material problems, or the sudden emotional crises, flies off into a nervous daydream fantasy, and proceeds to reassure himself by going through the antic of playing on an imaginary violoncello. It is a fine study in that pathos of weakness which somehow or other defeats Life, the eternal bully.
I think that Mr. Walpole must feel a deep-seated affinity with Trollope when he encounters such a piece of workmanship. At any rate, the understanding is there, for a more compre- hending study than this one could not wish for. The external life of the indefatigable novelist and no less indefatigable Civil Servant is sketched clearly, and then follows the chronicle of his work, an analysis of it, and finally a most convincing study of the character of the man as portrayed in his work and his conduct.
' If ever there was an example of achievement through an
infinite capacity for to pains, it was Anthony Trollope. He began beg as a lubberly youth in a bankrupt household
besieged by duns. Under the stress of such an environment, he received no proper or orderly education, except it was in the art of helping his brave mother to prevent the last sixpence from escaping through the hole in the family stocking. He tells the story, in his Autobiography, of how he drove his father to the station while the brokers' men had entered the house. As they jogged happily along, his father told him that this journey was not to London, but a flight to the Continent. Without more ado, the young Trollope—then a lad of nineteen considered to be useful to neither God nor man—drove back alone, brooding lugubriously over the situation. Suddenly he was stopped by the gardener, who had wandered down the road to prevent his approach. This worthy " with gestures, sighs, and whispered words gave me to understand that the whole affair—horse, gig, and harness—would be made prize of if I went but a few yard's further. Why they should not have been made prize of I do not know. The little piece of dishonest business which I at once took in hand and carried through successfully was of no special service to any of us. I drove the gig into the village and sold the entire equipage to the ironmonger for £17, the exact sum which he claimed as being due to himself. I fancy that the ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness."
That is a typical picture of the sleights and dodges to which the young man was put, during the early years of manhood, merely to keep body and soul together. Unkempt, a sort of comic Ishmael, he always caught the chastisement because he obviously looked the naughty one in every escapade. He was always in trouble during his early years in the Post Office, either for unpunetuality, or for card playing, or for clumsily spilling a bottle of ink over a vastly superior officer. All this persecution and hardship came at the most impression- able period of his life. Yet, as Mr. Walpe4e. reminds us, how marvellous it was " that the bullied, tortured, derided child should, out of that misery, have extracted the kindly, gentle, and tolerant philosophy that moves through all his books ! In none of them is there anywhere a trace of selfish bitterness, in none of them a whine, or a groan, or a curse."
The Autobiography—a narrative as sparse and direct as a tale by Defoe—tells of the gradual persistence with which Trollope crept out of the morass of debt and petty embarrass- ment. Side by side he built up, as it were, two careers ; for it must not be forgotten that as a Civil Servant he did some solid work for the State. I believe that he actually visited on horseback nearly every village Post Office in England and Wales, inquiring into the delivery and collection of posts. As the result of this ardous itinerary—during which he was writing his first books—he presented a report which ended in the suppression of payment-on-demand postage rates, and in the establishment of pillar-boxes ! Subsequently he represented the Post Office on several important conferences relating to international postal matters.
Along with these activities, he married and brought up a family, and built the huge fabric of his literary house. To do this last, he made a practice of rising every day at five o'clock and writing steadily for three hours, his watch on his desk, purposing always to build at the rate of a thousand words an hour. This habit he copied from his mother, who began her literary career—purely to keep the wolf from the door—when she was fifty, and produced over a hundred books before she died.
Imagine how Trollope's shameless revelation, in the Autobiography, of this journeyman attitude to the practice of literature horrified the aesthetic eighties, when the sacred Walter Pater was producing scented prose out of his Delphic brazier, each sentence attended with a ceremony under the tower of Great Tom of Oxford ; and when Oscar Wilde's pursed lips were shaping their pearl-like epigrams.
The result was an immediate slump, and the safe firm of Trollope and Pen came almost to a standstill. His fame remained under that obscuration for forty years, and one of the miracles of literary history is the present-day popularity of his work, not so much amongst general readers as amongst those more sophisticated, who are weary of the posture and prophetic claims of many of the giants of this generation, who think that having built a shadowy world of their own they can offer a substantial one for the rest of humanity.
I believe our satisfaction in his work rests on the fact that here is a man who could stand hard and frequent knocks. He did not claim a special reward from life ; and knowing " how harsh and cruel and ugly it can be," yet did not allow any " experience of his own to prevent him from finding life the most inspiriting, man-making, soul-rewarding experi- ence. He savoured it with all the blood in his body from the first years when, neglected' in body and despised in soul, he stumped down the muddy lanes to a school that he loathed, to the last years when he knew that his popularity was gone and his race was run."
The result was an artist who looked for virtue and beauty in the little things of life, the foibles, habits, hopes, and prejudices which are eternal since they are part of the daily existence of man, and distinguish his home from the vast impersonality of the natural world around him. Such is the Trollope which Mr. Walpole has so skilfully painted.
McKim) Cuuacu.
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