Mr. Trollope's Latest Character

MR. ANTHONY TROLLOPE, who in his lifetime drew the portraits of a multitude of Englishmen and Englishwomen, has left for exhibition after his death one of the most truthful and interesting in the series, — a portrait of himself,¹ treated with that directness of touch and honesty which have made his squires, parsons, noblemen, gentlemen, and gentlewomen truthful representations of a matter-of-fact England. In speaking of the business of the novelist, Mr. Trollope says, —

“ He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brain should be to them speaking, 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. He 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 person in his novel should be a month older than on the first. If the would-be novelist have aptitudes that way, all this will come to him without much struggling ; 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 success 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 color of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he 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 out to grass.”

Most people imagine that they know themselves in this fashion ; but let them try to tell the story of their lives, and they will see what poor stuff they will make of it. Mr. Trollope knew himself as he knew his characters, and the facility which he had acquired as the historian of imaginary persons stood him in good stead when he came to write his own history. He was as real to himself as Mr. Crawley and Johnny Eames were to him ; and as, in sketching their lives, he knew a great deal more than he told, but told what was necessary to be known, so in this autobiography he has gone just so far in narrating the circumstances and development of his life as a complete picture, with the Trollope limitations, required. The reason why Hawthorne could never have written his autobiography, and chose that no one else, if he could prevent it, should write his life, was in the kind of interest which he took in the persons whom he created. He could not stop short of the arcana of being; and however much he might use introspection for this purpose, it would have been an insult to himself had he treated himself in print as he treated even Miles Coverdale. Mr. Trollope stopped a long way short of the arcana of being, and had no difficulty in using quite as much frankness concerning himself as he used concerning his fictitious characters.

The sketch which he draws of his boyish life is much the most complete and penetrating part of the autobiography. Since he was making an object of himself, his boyhood was naturally more easily projected into space than his later life, to which he was more closely linked. Most people find it easier to detach their personality from their boyhood than from their maturity. The boy is father of the man, and a man does not confuse his father with himself. Trollope’s boyhood was a miserable existence, haunted by indigent gentility, and cursed with more than ordinary boyish awkwardness and isolation. The distinctness with which he remembers all his wretchedness induces a mingled sense of pity and shame. Poor little Trollope ! he says to himself. You were kicked and cuffed about; but oh, how generally unattractive you must have been !

His account of his mother and his father is exceedingly well done. There is no want of respect, and yet he manages to give the reader a very clear notion of the visionary, unpractical character of his father, and the courageous, optimistic, self-satisfied nature of his mother. His is mother, it will be remembered, was one of the earliest of the English censors who found the United States disgracefully different from England. “ No observer,” her son candidly says, " was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects, or even of the happiness, of a young people. No one could have been worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women do, from her own standing-point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes, it ought to be ugly to all eyes ; and if ugly, it must be bad. What though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear, if they put their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters ? The Americans were to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar, and she told them so. . . . Her volumes were very bitter; but they were also clever, and they saved the family from ruin. . . . Work sometimes came hard to her, so much being required, — for she was extravagant, and liked to have money to spend ; but of all people I have known, she was the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy.” The notices of his mother are many, and each adds to our acquaintance; but of his father he writes more briefly, though with a summing up which reads as if it were taken out of the book of the day of judgment: —

“ I sometimes look back, meditating for hours together, on his adverse fate. He was a man finely educated, of great parts, with immense capacity for work, physically strong, very much beyond the average of men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to fair fortunes, who, when he started in the world, may be said to have had everything at his feet. But everything went wrong with him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure. He embarked in one hopeless enterprise after another, spending on each all the money he could at the time command. But the worst curse to him of all was a temper so irritable that even those whom he loved the best could not endure it. We were all estranged from him, and yet I believe that he would have given his heart’s blood for any of us. His life, as I knew it, was one long tragedy.”

The outward circumstances of his own life, after he left his home and began to support himself, were more varied than fall to the lot of most men. He obtained a clerkship in the postoffice ; and when he was regarded by his superior officers as a ne’er-do-weel, he asked and obtained permission to undertake a difficult task in connection with the work of the office in Ireland. His success there laid the foundation of his business fortune. He remained in the post-office service until 1867, a period of thirty-three years; but it must not be supposed that the varied circumstance of his life was outside of this work. On the contrary, it was by means of it. For a large part of the time his business was to make journeys for the office, to ferret out abuses, and to establish postal connections with remote hamlets.

“ Early in 1851,” he says, “ I was sent upon a job of special official work, which for two years so completely absorbed my time that I was able to write nothing. A plan was formed for extending the rural delivery of letters, and for adjusting the work, which up to that time had been done in a very irregular manner. A country letter-carrier would be sent in one direction, in which there were but few letters to be delivered, the arrangement having originated, probably, at the request of some influential person ; while in another direction there was no letter-carrier, because no influential person had exerted himself. It was intended to set this right throughout England, Ireland, and Scotland ; and I quickly did the work in the Irish district to which I was attached. I was then invited to do the same in a portion of England, and I spent two of the happiest years of my life at the task. I began in Devonshire, and visited, I think I may say, every nock in that county, in Cornwall, Somersetshire, the greater part of Dorsetshire, the Channel Islands, part of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business after a fashion in which no other official man has worked, at least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired a third horse. I had an Irish groom with me, an old man, who has now been in my service for thirty-five years ; and in tins manner I saw almost every house — I think I may say every house of importance— in this large district. The object was to create a postal network winch should catch all recipients of letters.”

This and similar work brought incidents of an amusing character, which Mr. Trollope recounts, in passing; but his autobiography is not one of his life, except as it bears pretty distinctly upon his literary career, and so he does not dwell at length upon his experience. It is very clear, however, that this excursiveness of occupation brought him immense resources, and enabled him to give that multitudinous detail on which he built the structure of his stories and their characters. If one is studying a particular subject every book which he opens casually has a page which illumines his study; and Mr. Trollope, busy with the creation of characters and incidents, could not fail to find right and left, as he went about the post-office business, materials for his work.

He does not say this in so many words, but the passage which we first quoted in this paper leaves us in no doubt. No one could live day by day in the imaginary world which Mr. Trollope projected, consort with its people and know them intimately, without economizing to the fullest extent all the experience which he enjoyed in the flesh - and-blood world which he inhabited. Mr. Trollope went still further. He accustomed himself to a continuity of literary labor which fairly takes one’s breath away. He is to the weak-willed literary brother what Miss Jane Taylor’s Mistress Dial was to the Discontented Pendulum. For Mr. Trollope was an indefatigable civil-service clerk ; he was a rider to hounds, who followed that amusement with a dogged persistency which makes his sport a satire upon other men’s business ; he was a club man ; he was, so far as glimpses show, a man of fine domestic habits. In each occupation he did enough to satisfy those who were engaged in the same way, and yet in literature he was the most voluminous of authors. At the close of his autobiography, he writes,—

“ And so I end the record of my literary performances, which I think are more in amount than the works of any other living English author. If any English authors not living have written more, — as may probably have been the case, — I do not know who they are. I find that, taking the books which have appeared under our names, I have published much more than twice as much as Carlyle. I have also published considerably more than Voltaire, even including his letters. We are told that Varro, at the age of eighty, had written four hundred and eighty volumes, and that he went on writing for eight years longer. I wish I knew what was the length of Varro’s volumes; I comfort myself by reflecting that the amount of manuscript described as a book in Varro’s time was not much. Varro, too, is dead, and Voltaire ; whereas I am still living, and may add to the pile.”

The explanation has been hinted at. The old prescription of nulla dies sine linea was taken literally by Trollope. When at home he did all his writing before breakfast, and when traveling he worked on the railway train or in his stateroom until he had finished his stint. So perfectly did he have his literary pulse under control that it beat two bundred and fifty words to every quarter of an hour. Think of that, unhappy littérateurs, who wait for the mood and weave a Penelope’s web, tearing up every night the unsatisfactory pages of the day ! Not only was this daily practice possible because of the daily association with the characters to be drawn, but the familiar life with the heroes and heroines of his stories, to which Mr. Trollope refers so often, was made a habit by the daily record of their doings. If he had only thought about them, and rarely written, they would have faded from his thought. If he had written irregularly and by moods, he would have needed to recall features and characteristics with a special effort. It was because Mr. Trollope made his work so common that he was able to make it so real and so generally even.

The narrative of his literary career is the occasion of his autobiography, and brings with it many reflections upon the history of the novel, criticisms upon other writers, and suggestions of the condition of authorship in England. By what he says of criticism Mr. Trollope lifts the corner of a curtain which hides a very repulsive picture of English literary life. Is it possible that there is so much lack of self-respect in authors and so much personal prejudice in criticism as Mr. Trollope, by making his own career an exception, would have us believe ?

The whole work is so entertaining that it is hard to forego the pleasure of pointing out the many amusing passages. Mr. Trollope, criticising himself, and turning over the leaves of his own books in the company of the readers, is as delightful as any figure which he has placed within those books. The suggestions which his career makes to the young littérateur are well worth heeding ; but after all, there is nothing which the autobiography gives of so much value as the character of this sturdy Englishman, the very hero of the matter of fact; tramping through fiction, riding to hounds, making straight lines from the post-office to every house, who worships in his novels an English Destiny as sure as the Greek Fate, and looks back upon his own life with a solid satisfaction in the good sense which has made it a cheerful success.