MR. TROLLOPE AS CRITIC.
IN Mr. Trollope's "Autobiography" he gives us a brief esti- mate both of his own works of fiction, and, to some extent, at least, of the novels of his contemporaries. What does one gather from these chapters of his own power as a critic ? Certainly this,—that his critical powers did not in any degree approach the calibre of his creative and constructive powers. That he bad a substantially sound judgment on such matters is a matter of course, for the great characteristic of all his novels is knowledge of the world; and a perfect knowledge of the world, even taken alone, implies that there could not have been in him any wide deviation from the healthy taste of cultivated Englishmen. Mr. Trollope's taste in novels was doubtless a sound one. Especially in relation to the novels of domestic life he was an admirable judge. He thought for a long time that Miss Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" was the best novel in the English language. Then he placed " Ivanhoe " above it. Then he accorded the highest position to Thackeray's "Esmond." Whether the finest critical judgment would endorse these views we greatly doubt, but they are sufficiently in accordance with the average judgment of educated men to show the thorough sanity of Mr. Trollope's taste. Again, of the novelists of his day, he puts George Eliot second to Thackeray, and greatly prefers the novels of her first period, those down to and including" Silas Harrier," to her later tales. He has no high estimate of Dickens's knowledge of human nature, thinks his pathos somewhat false in ring, and cannot even justify to his own judgment the vast popu- larity of Dickens's humour. Of Bulwer, Mr. Trollope's estimate is altogether low, and though he recognises his great talent, he finds mannerism and affectation in all his works. Of Wilkie Collins and his school, again, Mr. Trollope speaks with great frankness and good sense. It vsxes him that" the author seems always to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past two o'clock on Tuesday morning ; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone." Again, on his own works,—whether he judges with delicacy, or not,—Mr. Trollope's judgment is thoroughly sane. He prefers the Barsetshire series to any other class of his novels, and thinks "The Last Chronicle of Barset " the best of the series. He could remember less, he said, of "The Belton Estate" than of any book he had ever written, and doubtless there was less of his own mind in it than in any book he ever wrote. All these opinions show Mr. Trollope's judgment, we do not say to be of the highest kind,—his estimate of Dickens's humour seems to us palpably and absurdly defective,—but thoroughly healthy and marked by the right tendencies. But there was very little of the finest elements of the critic in him. No great critic, we take it, could possibly have preferred Thackeray's "Esmond," with all its skill and fineness of texture, to the over- flowing wealth and power of "Vanity Fair." In "Esmond," Thackeray's creative power was certainly much less prodigal, much less magnificent in its effects, than it was in "Vanity Fair."
Again, even in "Esmond," Mr. Trollope does not single out anything like the finest scene, when he selects Lady Castle- wood's defence of Henry Esmond to the Duke of Hamilton, as the scene of the book. Thackeray rose far higher in the passion of the scene in which Lady Castlewood welcomes Henry Esmond back from the Continent, after the Evensong in Winchester Cathedral, than in that of the scene with the Duke of Hamilton. Indeed Thackeray is almost always much greater when he paints the unchecked overflow of a woman's love, than when he paints her in a dramatic position addressing herself to a number of hearers. His passion is tender and deep ; in the scenes of social effect he cannot help showing that he is not only a painter of the heart, but a satirist of the weak- nesses of men.
The truth was, as is evident from his "Autobiography," that Mr. Trollope, knowing how inferior is the function of criticism to the function of creative genius, never recognised the distinction between the two, and was not aware that, as a rule, vast creative power is too active, too positive, to be receptive and to dis- criminate very finely the shades of effect in the works of other authors. It is comparatively seldom that redundant creative power is accompanied by fine critical power. Sir Walter Scott, the most powerful by far of all English novelists, was, like Mr. Trollope himself, a sound and sensible, but by no means a fine critic. Sir Walter was too much occupied by the hardy and teeming life in his own brain to lend fully his imaginative life to the service of others. It is the same with Dickens, and apparently even with George Eliot. What is wanted for truly fine criticism is the receptive side of the poet, without an imagination so teeming as to interfere with the fullest exercise of the receptive powers. Some of the best criticisms of our century have been the criticisms of Goethe and of Matthew Arnold, both of them fine poets, but both of them poets without hurry of creative impulse, without imaginative idiosyncracy so preponderant as to pre- vent them from fully submitting their minds to the influence of other men of genius of whose work they desired to form a true estimate. Nothing can be less like such a temperament as this than the temperament of Mr. Trollope. Let us see how he himself describes his own creative power, and the manner in which it worked
I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labour similar to those which an artisan or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker, when he has finished one pair of shoes, does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction. ' Thero is my pair of shoes finished at last! What a pair of shoes it is !' The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer ilf books. An author may, of course, want time to study a now subject. He will at any rate assure himself that there is some such good reason why he should pause. Ho does pause, and will be idle for a month or two while he tells himself how beautiful is that last pair of shoes which he has finished ! Having thought much of allthis, and having made up my mind that I could be really happy only when I was at work, I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a s3cond pair as soon as the first was out of my hands."
And yet though Mr. Trollope has almost always begun one novel on the day succeeding that on which the previous novel was finished, he has, he tells us, been entirely wrapped up in his creations, and has lived his life with them as if they were the inhabitants of his own world But the novelist has other aims than the elucidation or his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brain should be to them speak- ing, moving, living, human creatures. This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. Ile must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them,. and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true,. and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here, in :our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him. On the last day of each month recorded, every per- son in his novel should be a month older than on the first. If the wou'd-be novelist have aptitudes that way, all this will come to hint without much straggling ;—but if it do not come, I think he can only make novels of wood. It is so that I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever succers I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether be would have said these or the other words ; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned. When I shall feel that this intimacy ceases, then I shall know that the old horse should be turned oat to grass."
Is it possible that an author who has lived this sort of imagina- tive life for day after day during thirty years, giving himself no rest, but entering a new imaginary world on the very morrow of the day on which he quitted the world which had just grown familiar to him, should be capable of that fine receptivity of mind which is requisite to appreciate with any delicacy the productions of others ? It seems to us quite certain that neither Sir Walter Scott nor Mr. Trollope,—both of whom, in their very different spheres, led this kind of imaginative life,—did appreciate with any delicacy the productions of others. Nor could Mr. Trollope give us a better proof of this than his very unhappy re- mark in relation to Lady Eustace of "The Eustace Diamonds." "As I wrote the book, the idea constantly presented itself to me that Lizzie Eustace was but a second Becky Sharpe ; but in planning the character I had not thought of this, and I believe that Lizzie would have been just as she is, though Becky Sharpe had never been described." Mr. Trollope need not have given us this assurance. He might almost as well have warned us that Archdeacon Grantley was not taken from Shakespeare's " Wolsey." Becky Sharp,—he spells her wrongly, as he does also Colonel Newcome, whom he repeatedly calls Colonel New- combe,—is a type of the infinite resource and unscrupulous genius of feminine intrigne,—a type of audacious craft as rich and humorous, and as full of the buoyant energy of selfishness, as Iago is rich and unscrupulous and full of buoyant malignity and evil. Lizzie Eustace is a treacherous, cunning little drawing- room woman, of no humour, no great power, and far, indeed, from the dimensions of Becky Sharp. If Mr. Trollope had com- pared Lizzie Eustace to Thackeray's Blanche Amory, he would have been nearer the mark. Becky Sharp is one of the greatest creations of Thackeray's genius. Lizzie Eustace is not even one of the best creations of Mr. Trollope's.
Indeed, one of the best evidences that Mr. Trollope's power is not in the maidof that receptive kind which makes the critic, is the great inferiority of his women to his men. We agree with him that Lily Dale is a good deal of a prig. But we do not agree with him in any depth of admiration for Lucy Roberts, or indeed for any other of his heroines, though we like Grace Crawley the best. The feminine essence is beyond the reach of men unless they be true poets, and never was there a man of great creative power who had less of the poet in him than Mr. Trollope. He speaks of the necessity of a certain rhythm and harmony of style, but his own victories were achieved in spite of a style that was almost painfully devoid of grace or inward expressive- ness. He has what we may call a bouncing style,—not, of course, a style of bounce, but the style of a bouncing ball,— one not ineffective to produce the impression that the events narrated by Mr. Trollope are real events, happening to real people, and reported by a real observer,—but effective rather because it is the style of a reporter hurrying on with the chronicle of matters which he has undertaken punctually to note down, than because it reflects any profound impression made on the feelings and imagination of the narrator. His style is clear, business-like, rapidly moving, noisy, and a little defiant, as if the writer would be beforehand with you, and wished to assert his own right to be heard before you had had time to dispute that right. It is a hard and rather dictatorial style that does not seem so much to come from deep-felt impressions as from certain knowledge. That is a good style to produce the sense of reality, but it is not the style of a fine critic, and though Mr. Trollope was a sensible critic,—as indeed he was sensible in everything,—a fine critic, even of his own writings, he was not. And for the same reason, probably, he was not a successful editor. His editing of the St. Paul's Magazine was conventional. He did not really know how to use contributors, how to make the most of them. Mr. Trollope's stories were well spun out of the imagination of a keen and vigilant observer ; but all his observing power was assimilated in the work of creation, was used-up as the flax is used up in the making of linen, and apparently he had little opportunity left for reflecting on the works of others, and for discriminating the fine threads and delicate colours by the use of which they had made their work characteristic and unique.
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