BOOKS.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.* Tins is in every way a characteristic book. It is very character- istic of Mr. Trollope that full six years before his death he should have completed an autobiography which he did not intend to be published in his life-time. In that, as in everything else that he did during his literary career, he was always several years in advance of his actual needs, and to those who know how rarely literary men are in advance of their actual needs, how much they trust to the spur of necessity for the stimulus requi- site for the supply of those needs, this redundant energy of Mr. Trollope's will seem not only characteristic, but even unique. Again, the absolute frankness of the book is most character- istic of Mr. Trollope ; and so is its unequalled,—manliness we were going to say,—but we mean something both more and less than manliness, covering more than the daring of manliness and something less than the quietness or equanimity which we are accustomed to include in that term, so we may call it, its un- equalled masculineness. Mr. Trollope is not only candid in this autobiography; but of any deficiency of his own which he wishes to confess, he confesses himself almost defiantly. In speaking of his oratorical shortcomings, he remarks, with great troth, "If there were something special to be said, I could say it in a common-place fashion ; but always as though I were in a hurry, and with the fear before me of being thought to be prolix." That was undoubtedly also Mr. Trollope's manner even in conversation, and that manner communicates a certain superficial appearance of aggressive- ness even to the style of his autobiography. There is a hurly- burly frankness about it, as of a man who is defying the public to prevent him from saying of himself precisely what he wants to say. And, no doubt, he does say precisely what he wants to say ; and what he wants to say is most creditable to him ; but it is thrust upon us somewhat too headlongly, too much after the fashion of the ardent hunting man he was, one who would ride straight across country, and was determined never to avail himself of any gap or gate which would furnish a more natural transition from one position to another. Then the book is also highly characteristic in its con- fessions of Mr. Trollope's official and political morality. Nothing more creditable to a public man than what he tells us of his

relation to the Post Office after he became a really trusted and efficient servant of the Post Office, could well be conceived. It is not the conscientiousness of his work to which we refer, for we hope that is common enough, but its austere independence of anything like concession to the weakness of his superiors,—its masterful resolve to let the authorities know that, implicitly as they were obeyed, they had the full and sole responsibility of carrying out a policy which one of the ablest of their subordi-

nates thought foolish, and the folly of which he would not shrink from demonstrating so far as they gave him the chance.

There are very few public officials who have the courage to act thus, and yet no line of conduct more patriotic, more truly use- ful to the institutions of the country, can be imagined, than this pertinacity of able subordinates in pressing their detailed criticism on the attention of their superiors, even at the very time at which they are implicitly following the instructions they receive. So, and so only, can the higher authorities get the full advantage of the experience of their subordinates, as well as the advantage of their fidelity in carrying out orders :—

" During the whole of this work in the Post Office it was my principle always to obey authority in everything instantly, but never to allow my mouth to be closed as to the expression of my opinion. They who had the ordering of me very often did not know the work as I know it,—could not tell as I could what would be the effect of this or that change. When carrying out instructions which I knew should not have been given, I never scrupled to point out the fatuity of the improper order in the strongest language that I could decently employ. I have revelled in these official correspondences, and look back to some of them as the greatest delights of my life. But I attx not sure that they were so delightful to others."

No wonder Mr. Trollope was not always a favourite at head- quarters. It is greatly to the honour of the Post Office that he was valued as highly as he was, and was entrusted with so many responsible duties by its chiefs. No doubt, in those "delicious feuds" of which be speaks with such intense enjoyment the feuds in which, apparently, he was generally pitted against Sir Rowland Hill and Sir Rowland Hill's party, he was fro-

• An Autobiography. By Anthony Trollop. 2 rob§. London : W. Blackwood and Bona.

quently right, though sometimes at least wrong. As regards, for instance, the question of competitive examinations, on which he so vehemently adopted the Conservative side, we believe him to have been quite wroug,—and wrong even on the very grounds on which he attacked the new system. But often, doubtless, Mr. Trollope was absolutely right, and we feel pretty sure that he understood the art, necessary in so great a Department, of governing men, much better than Sir Rowland Hill.

This book is characteristic also in the complete sincerity of its somewhat mundane ideal of life. Mr. Trollope seems to be one of the few men who have really reached their ideal, and enjoyed reaching it to the full. It is not often that a man of genius,—and no one will deny that Mr. Trollope was a man of genius,—would be able to write as Mr. Trollope writes in this frank and manly passage :—

" I had created for myself a position among literary men, and had secured to myself an income on which I might live in ease and corn- fort,—which ease and comfort have been made to include many luxuries. From this time for a period of twelve years my income averaged 24,500 a year. Of this I spent about two-thirds, and put by one. I ought perhaps to have done better,—to have spent one- third, and put by two ; but I have ever been too well inclined to spend freely that which has come easily. This, however, has been so exactly the life which my thoughts and aspirations had marked out,—thoughts and aspirations which used to cause me to blush with shame because I was so slow in forcing myself to the work which they demanded,—that I have felt some pride in having attained it. I have before said how entirely I fail to reach the altitude of those who think that a man devoted to letters should be indifferent to the pecuniary results for which work is generally done. An easy income has always been regarded by me as a great blessing. Not to have to think of sixpences, or very much of shillings ; not to be unhappy because the coals have been burned too quickly, and the house linen wants renewing ; not to be debarred by the rigour of necessity from opening one's hands, perhaps foolishly, to one's friends ;—all this to me has been essential to the comfort of life. I have enjoyed the comfort for I may almost say the last twenty years, though no man in his youth had less prospect of doing so, or would have been loss likely at twenty.five to have had such luxuries foretold to him by his friends. But though the money has been sweet, the respect, the friendships, and the mode of life which has been achieved, have been much sweeter. In my boyhood, when I would be crawling up to school with dirty boots and trousers through the muddy lanes, I was always telling myself that the misery of the hour was not the worst of it, but that the mud and solitude and poverty of the time would insure me mud and solitude and poverty through my life. Those lads about me would go into Parliament, or become rectors and deans, or squires of parishes, or advocates thundering at the Bar. They would not live with me now,—but neither should I be able to live with them in after years. Neverthe- less, I have lived with them. When, at the age in which others go to the Universities, I became a clerk in the Post Office, I felt that my old visions were being realised. I did not think it a high calling. I did not know then how very much good work may be done by a member of the Civil Service who will show himself capable of doing it. The Post Office at last grew upon me, and forced itself into my affections. I became intensely anxious that people should have their letters delivered to them punctually. But my hope to rise had always been built on the writing of novels, and at last by the writing of novels I had risen. I do not think that I ever toadied any one, or that I have acquired the character of a tuft-hunter. But here I do not scruple to say that I prefer the society of distinguished people, and that even the distinc- tion of wealth confers many advantages. The best education is to be had at a price, as well as the best broadcloth. The son of a peer is more likely to rub his shoulders against well-informed men than the son of a tradesman. The graces come easier to the wife of him who has bad great-grandfathers than they do to her whose husband has been less,—or more fortunate, as he may think it. The discerning man will recognise the information and the graces when they are achieved without such assistance, and will honour the owners of them the more because of the difficulties they have overcome ;—but the fact remains that the society of the well-born and of the wealthy will as a rule be worth seeking. I say this now, because these are the rules by which I have lived, and these are the causes which have instigated me to work."

There is a great deal in that passage which any man might well be proud to be able to write with that complete and abso- lute truthfulness with which Mr. Trollope has written it. But there is in it a curious revelation of the secret of Mr. Trollope's energy and efficiency in the bareness of the ideal itself, and the overflowing satisfaction with which it is contemplated. Strangely enough, Mr. Trollope could create characters, and did create characters who, if they had written down their own ideals, would have painted something which seems to us infinitely higher than such an ideal as this. His own favourite, Plantagenet Palliser—not the Plantagenet Palliser of Framley Parsonage, but the Plantagenet Palliser of Can You Forgive .Her ? and the subsequent novels, especially when he becomes Duke of Omnium, and has to manage unruly children after the death of his wife, had a far higher ideal than this. Mr. Harding had a far higher ideal than this. So had Mr. Crawley, and so

even had Dean Arabin. But it is difficult, after reading this auto- biography, not to feel that Mr. Trollope had a higher ideal whew thinking the thoughts of some of the children of his own imagina- tion, than he had when thinking his own. Of course, as he tells us, this Autobiography is not intended to give any record of his inner life. But the very passage in which he tells this, and in which he is taking his farewell of his readers, is written in a key that does not suggest any of those subtler and deeper yearnings which usually enter into the essential ideal of a man of genius :—

"It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have in- tended in this so-called autobiography to give a record of my inner life. No man ever did so truly,—and no man ever will. Rousseau probably attempted it, but who doubts but that Rousseau has confessed in much the thoughts and convictions rather than the facts of his life ? If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cap 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 earthly- paradise ; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a 25 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 thaw 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 untested,— that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger,—but I carry no ugly wounds._ For what remains to me of life I trust for my happiness still chiefly to my work—hoping that when the power of work be over with me, God may be pleased to take me from a world in which, according to my view, there can be no joy ; secondly, to the love of those who- love me; and then to my books."

That is hardly the tone, we think, in which a man would write who had purposely kept out of his narrative the highest aspira- tions of his life. Mr. Trollope was thoroughly in earnest in wishing to teach a high morality by his tales,—and no tales could be purer than his from anything like mischief ; at the same- time, we should say that what he understood as a high morality was a morality of a very limited kind, and involved little mom, for men and women in general than insisting that girls should be modest and loving, and that men should be honest and diligent, and should know their own minds. He hardly even teaches so much as that men should be pure as well as women, or that women should be courageous as well as men. Here is one of the passages in which he exhibits his doctrine as to the moral teaching of the novel :— " The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he teach, whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach. lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to his: readers ? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to be- agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the Same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics. If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them, then I think Mr. Carlyle need not cull him distressed, nor talk of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether be be or not the most foolish- of existing mortals. I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a class that such has been the general result of our own work. Looking back to the past genera- tion, I may say with certainty that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with that absence of self. personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has- been the result of my own writing. Can any one by search through, the works of the six great English novelists I have named, find a, scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest ? When men in their pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have they not ever been punished ? It is not for the novelist to say, baldly and simply : 'Because you lied here, or were heartless there, because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home, or you Earl Leicester were false through year ambition, or you Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall be scourged with scourges, either in this world or in the next? but it is for him to show,. as he carries on his tale, that his Lydia, or his Leicester, or hi; Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever, beautiful, &Urea- tive,—so as to make men love her, and women almost envy her,—and let her be made also heartless, unfeminine, and ambitious of evilgran- deur, as was Beatrix, what a danger is there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it, what peril of doing harm ! But if at last it have been so handled that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say : 'Oh! not like that ;—let me not be like that r. and that every youth shall say : 'Let me not have such a one as that to press to my bosom, anything rather than that!'—then will not the novelist have preached his sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it ?"

It is perfectly obvious that Mr. Trollope succeeded in embody- ing this ideal of the moral teaching of a novel in almost all his tales. But in how very few of them did he por- tray a character which puts before us a very high or delicate -standard of motive and principle, such as that of the Duke in The Duke's Children, or that of Mr. Harding in all the Barchester stories, or that of Mr. Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barret, or that of Dean Arabia in the same story. For the most part, Mr. Trollope is content with showing up the meanness of ,cowardice and dishonesty, and the misery of marrying without love, and he owes it rather to the force of his imagination than to his own personal ideal of what life should be, if he takes us into a finer and rarer atmosphere of spiritual feeling. The redund- ant healthiness and energy of Mr. Trollope show themselves abundantly in this autobiography, as in his stories ; but -certainly part of tho. secret of that energy was that he did not *Tend his strength, like George Eliot, on constructing subtle, or fastidious, or ambitious moral ideals, nor even, like Thackeray, on lamenting that human weakness so frequently foils the endeavours which the human conscience originates.

The passage in these volumes which has given us as much pleasure as any, is the admirable one in which Mr. Trollope :sketches his own political attitude, and gives the rationale of his political belief. We have always had the impression which Mr. Frederic Greenwood, who was the editor of the Pall Mall 'Gazette during the period of Mr. Trollope's contributions to it, has just confirmed, that Mr. Trollope was not an able political writer, and hardly ever touched a political question so as to throw any fresh light upon it. So much the more gratifying is it to find in his Autobiography a passage so clear and thoughtful, and so full of wise moderation, as the following Writing now at an age beyond sixty, I can say that my political feelings and convictions have never undergone any change. They are now what they became when I first began to have political feel- ings and convictions. Nor do I find in myself any tendency to modify them as I have found generally in men as they grow old. I -consider myself to be an advanced, but still a Conservative-Liberal, which I regard not only as a possible but as a rational and consistent phase of political existence. I can, I believe, in a very few words, make 'known my political theory; and as I am anxious that any who know aught of me should know that, I will endeavour to do so. It must, I think, be painful to all men to feel inferiority. It should, I think, be a matter of some pain to all men to feel superiority, unless when it has been won by their own efforts. We do not understand the -operations of Almighty wisdom, and are therefore unable to tell the menses of the terrible inequalities that we see,—why some, why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make ite painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand. We acknowledge the band of God and his wisdom, but still we are struck with awe and :horror at the misery of many of our brethren. We who have been born to the superior condition,—for in this matter I consider myself to be standing on a platform with dukes and princes, and all others -to whom plenty ond education and liberty have been given,—cannot, think, look upon the inane, unintellectnal, and test-bound life of those who cannot even feed themselves sufficiently by their sweat, 'without some feeling of injustice, some feeling of pain. This con- sciousness of wrong has induced in many enthusiastic but unbalanced minds a desire to set all things right by a proclaimed equality. In their efforts such men have shown how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator. For the mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awestruck by apparent in- justice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow. The so-called Conservative, the conscientious philan- thropic Conservative, seeing this, and being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them. He thinks that the preservation of the welfare of the world depends on the maintenance of those distances between the prince and the peasant by which he finds himself to be sur- rounded ;—and perhaps, I may add, that the duty is not unpleasant, as he feels himself to be one of the princes. But this man, though he sees something, and sees that very clearly, Bees only a little. The -divine inequality is apparent to him, but not the equally divine diminution of that inequality. That such diminution is taking place -on all sides is apparent enough ; but it is apparent to him as an evil, the Consummation of which it is his duty to retard. He cannot pre- vent it ; and therefore the society to which he belongs is, in his eyes, retrograding. He will even, at times, assist it; and will do so con- scientiously, feeling that, under the gentle pressure supplied by him, and with the drags and holdfasts which he may add, the movement would be slower than it would become if subjected to his proclaimed and absolute opponents. Such, I think, are Conservatives ;—and I speak of men who, with the fear of God before their eyes and the love of their neighbours warm in their hearts, endeavour to do their -duty to the best of their ability. Using the term which is now e011111101), and which will be best understood, I will endeavour to ex- plain bow the equally conscientious Liberal is opposed to the Con- servative. He is equally aware that these distances are of divine origin, equally averse to any sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessednens;—but he is alive to the fact that these -distances are day by day becoming less, and he regards this continual 'diminution as a series of steps towards that human millennium of 'which he dreams. He is even willing to help the many to ascend the ladder a little, though he knows, as they come up towards him,

he must go down to meet them. What is really in his mind will not say equality, for the word is offensive, and presents to the imaginations of men ideas of communism, of ruin, and insane de- mocracy,—but a tendency towards equality. In following that, how- ever, he knows that he must be hemmed in by safeguards, lost he be tempted to travel too quickly; and therefore be is glad to be accom- panied on his way by the repressive action of a Conservative opponent. Holding such views, I think I am guilty of no absurdity in calling myself an advanced Conservative-Liberal. A man who entertains in his mind any political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition of his fellows, I regard as a political in- triguer, a charlatan, and a conjaror,—as one who thinks that, by a certain amount of wary wire-pulling, he may raise himself in the estimation of the world."

That seems to us one of the wisest and tersest summaries of political principle which we have ever come across, one given, too, with none of that hurry and noisiness of style which so often injures Mr. Trollope's reflective writing. It does not make us regret that Mr. Trollope failed in his canvas at Beverley,— for life in Parliament would certainly have been waste of life to him,—but it does show us that there was more of the statesman in him than we had ever before suspected, for unquestionably Mr. Greenwood is right in saying that in political writing Mr. Trollope generally failed. Only a charlatan or a madman will talk of the equality of all mankind, or even of all the citizens of one nation. Only a Tory will talk of artificially created inequalities as if they were pure blessings, which it becomes wise statesmen jealously to protect, and even to exaggerate. But the true Liberal will, as Mr. Trollope says, do all in his power to attenuate the artificial inequalities which caste and privilege have created or exaggerated to the great disadvantage of those who are heavily weighted in the race, without attempting to raise in any class the false hope that by any possible manipulation of affairs it can ever be contrived that all men shall start with even chances in life, or even that equal powers shall be sure of equal success. The principle of true Liberalism was evidently held by Mr. Trollope in its simplest form. But we doubt whether political life ever interested him like the development of human character ; and political life treated from a merely social point of view was a theme which he would justly have despised.