Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
Cloister and the Hearth. I do not know that in this work, or in any,
that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written
some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be
a pleasure.
Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak
with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in
a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch
which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural
that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When
I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very
much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct
his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to
the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots
it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary
dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The
construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never
lose the taste of the construction. 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 mile-stone. One is
constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,
however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties
overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no
pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the
want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect.
There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel
that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how
much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda
Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost
as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more
dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss
Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human
nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that
good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which
she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be
proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work,
and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages.
Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though
she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however,
does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the
ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women
do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man
who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her
brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who
would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast.
There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and
in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured
as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to
nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and
missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies
would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and
when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves
again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live
to overcome her fault in this direction.
There is one other name, without which the list of the best known
English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete,
and that is the name of the present Prime Minister of England. Mr.
Disraeli has written so many novels, and has been so popular as a
novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled
to speak of him. He began his career as an author early in life,
publishing Vivian Grey when he was twenty-three years old. He was
very young for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the
excuse that he makes in his own preface, that it is a book written
by a boy. Dickens was, I think, younger when he wrote his Sketches
by Boz, and as young when he was writing the Pickwick Papers. It
was hardly longer ago than the other day when Mr. Disraeli brought
out Lothair, and between the two there were eight or ten others.
To me they have all had the same flavour of paint and unreality.
In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been
intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand.
Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his
object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment
and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious,
more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the
glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been
a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and
the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious
conjurer has generally been his hero,--some youth who, by wonderful
cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to
his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties,
a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors,
and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general
accompaniment of paste diamonds. I can understand that Mr. Disraeli
should by his novels have instigated many a young man and many a
young woman on their way in life, but I cannot understand that he
should have instigated any one to good. Vivian Grey has had probably
as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and has led his followers in
the same direction.
Lothair, which is as yet Mr. Disraeli's last work, and, I think,
undoubtedly his worst, has been defended on a plea somewhat similar
to that by which he has defended Vivian Grey. As that was written
when he was too young, so was the other when he was too old,--too
old for work of that nature, though not too old to be Prime Minister.
If his mind were so occupied with greater things as to allow him to
write such a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce
him to destroy it when written. Here that flavour of hair-oil,
that flavour of false jewels, that remembrance of tailors, comes
out stronger than in all the others. Lothair is falser even than
Vivian Grey, and Lady Corisande, the daughter of the Duchess, more
inane and unwomanlike than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the
very bathos of story-telling. I have often lamented, and have as
often excused to myself, that lack of public judgment which enables
readers to put up with bad work because it comes from good or from
lofty hands. I never felt the feeling so strongly, or was so little
able to excuse it, as when a portion of the reading public received
Lothair with satisfaction.
CHAPTER XIV ON CRITICISM
Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,--but
it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving
that certain literary work is good and other literary work is
bad, in accordance with rules which the critic is able to define.
English criticism at present rarely even pretends to go so far as
this. It attempts, in the first place, to tell the public whether
a book be or be not worth public attention; and, in the second
place, so to describe the purport of the work as to enable those
who have not time or inclination for reading it to feel that by a
short cut they can become acquainted with its contents. Both these
objects, if fairly well carried out, are salutary. Though the
critic may not be a profound judge himself; though not unfrequently
he be a young man making his first literary attempts, with tastes
and judgment still unfixed, yet he probably has a conscience in the
matter, and would not have been selected for that work had he not
shown some aptitude for it. Though he may be not the best possible
guide to the undiscerning, he will be better than no guide at all.
Real substantial criticism must, from its nature, be costly, and
that which the public wants should at any rate be cheap. Advice is
given to many thousands, which, though it may not be the best advice
possible, is better than no advice at all. Then that description
of the work criticised, that compressing of the much into very
little,--which is the work of many modern critics or reviewers,--does
enable many to know something of what is being said, who without
it would know nothing.
I do not think it is incumbent on me at present to name periodicals
in which this work is well done, and to make complaints of others
by which it is scamped. I should give offence, and might probably
be unjust. But I think I may certainly say that as some of these
periodicals are certainly entitled to great praise for the manner
in which the work is done generally, so are others open to very
severe censure,--and that the praise and that the censure are
chiefly due on behalf of one virtue and its opposite vice. It is
not critical ability that we have a right to demand, or its absence
that we are bound to deplore. Critical ability for the price we
pay is not attainable. It is a faculty not peculiar to Englishmen,
and when displayed is very frequently not appreciated. But that
critics should be honest we have a right to demand, and critical
dishonesty we are bound to expose. If the writer will tell us what
he thinks, though his thoughts be absolutely vague and useless,
we can forgive him; but when he tells us what he does not think,
actuated either by friendship or by animosity, then there should
be no pardon for him. This is the sin in modern English criticism
of which there is most reason to complain.
It is a lamentable fact that men and women lend themselves to this
practice who are neither vindictive nor ordinarily dishonest. It
has become "the custom of the trade," under the veil of which excuse
so many tradesmen justify their malpractices! When a struggling
author learns that so much has been done for A by the Barsetshire
Gazette, so much for B by the Dillsborough Herald, and, again, so
much for C by that powerful metropolitan organ the Evening Pulpit,
and is told also that A and B and C have been favoured through personal
interest, he also goes to work among the editors, or the editors'
