Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

the nose, is disgusting. In these he will hardly tread. But there

are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers

seem to grow; and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands

that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit

that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the

flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem

to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing!

The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And

he must 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 call him distressed, nor talk

of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he 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 has been the general result of our own

work. Looking back to the past generation, 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 your 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 his Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation

of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever,

beautiful, attractive,--so as to make men love her, and women

almost envy her,--and let her be made also heartless, unfeminine,

and ambitious of evil grandeur, 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!" and that every youth shall say:

"Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom, anything

rather than that!"--then will not the novelist have preached his

sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it?

Very much of a novelist's work must appertain to the intercourse

between young men and young women. It is admitted that a novel

can hardly be made interesting or successful without love. Some few

might be named, but even in those the attempt breaks down, and the

softness of love is found to be necessary to complete the story.

Pickwick has been named as an exception to the rule, but even

in Pickwick there are three or four sets of lovers, whose little

amatory longings give a softness to the work. I tried it once with

Miss Mackenzie, but I had to make her fall in love at last. In this

frequent allusion to the passion which most stirs the imagination

of the young, there must be danger. Of that the writer of fiction

is probably well aware. Then the question has to be asked, whether

the danger may not be so averted that good may be the result,--and

to be answered.

respect the necessity of dealing with love is advantageous,--advantageous

from the very circumstance which has made love necessary to

all novelists. It is necessary because the passion is one which

interests or has interested all. Every one feels it, has felt it,

or expects to feel it,--or else rejects it with an eagerness which

still perpetuates the interest. If the novelist, therefore, can

so handle the subject as to do good by his handling, as to teach

wholesome lessons in regard to love, the good which he does will

be very wide. If I can teach politicians that they can do their

business better by truth than by falsehood, I do a great service;

but it is done to a limited number of persons. But if I can make

young men and women believe that truth in love will make them

happy, then, if my writings be popular, I shall have a very large

class of pupils. No doubt the cause for that fear which did exist

as to novels arose from an idea that the matter of love would be

treated in an inflammatory and generally unwholesome manner. "Madam,"

says Sir Anthony in the play, "a circulating library in a town is

an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the

year; and depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of

handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last." Sir Anthony

was no doubt right. But he takes it for granted that the longing

for the fruit is an evil. The novelist who writes of love thinks

differently, and thinks that the honest love of an honest man is

a treasure which a good girl may fairly hope to win,--and that if

she can be taught to wish only for that, she will have been taught

to entertain only wholesome wishes.

I can easily believe that a girl should be taught to wish to love

by reading how Laura Bell loved Pendennis. Pendennis was not in

truth a very worthy man, nor did he make a very good husband; but

the girl's love was so beautiful, and the wife's love when she became

a wife so womanlike, and at the same time so sweet, so unselfish,

so wifely, so worshipful,--in the sense in which wives are told

that they ought to worship their husband,--that I cannot believe

that any girl can be injured, or even not benefited, by reading of

Laura's love.

There once used to be many who thought, and probably there still

are some, even here in England, who think that a girl should hear

nothing of love till the time come in which she is to be married.

That, no doubt, was the opinion of Sir Anthony Absolute and of Mrs.

Malaprop. But I am hardly disposed to believe that the old system

was more favourable than ours to the purity of manners. Lydia

Languish, though she was constrained by fear of her aunt to hide

the book, yet had Peregrine Pickle in her collection. While human

nature talks of love so forcibly it can hardly serve our turn

to be silent on the subject. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque

recurret." There are countries in which it has been in accordance

with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought

to marry the man almost out of the nursery--or rather perhaps out

of the convent--without having enjoyed that freedom of thought

which the reading of novels and of poetry will certainly produce;

but I do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to

be happier than our own.

Among English novels of the present day, and among English

novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels

and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational,

sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are

considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic.

I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed

to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to

take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by

the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development

of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake,--which mistake arises

from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time

realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in

the highest degree. If a novel fail in either, there is a failure

in art. Let those readers who believe that they do not like

sensational scenes in novels think of some of those passages from

our great novelists which have charmed them most:--of Rebecca in

the castle with Ivanhoe; of Burley in the cave with Morton; of the

mad lady tearing the veil of the expectant bride, in Jane Eyre; of

Lady Castlewood as, in her indignation, she explains to the Duke

of Hamilton Henry Esmond's right to be present at the marriage of

his Grace with Beatrix;--may I add of Lady Mason, as she makes her

confession at the feet of Sir Peregrine Orme? Will any one say that

the authors of these passages have sinned in being over-sensational? No

doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth

in detail, and told as affecting personages without character,--wooden

blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men

and women, does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with

awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in

themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person,

are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. And such would-be

tragic elements of a story may be increased without end, and

without difficulty. I may tell you of a woman murdered,--murdered

in the same street with you, in the next house,--that she was a

wife murdered by her husband,--a bride not yet a week a wife. I may

add to it for ever. I may say that the murderer roasted her alive.

There is no end to it. I may declare that a former wife was treated

with equal barbarity; and may assert that, as the murderer was led

away to execution, he declared his only sorrow, his only regret

to be, that he could not live to treat a third wife after the same

fashion. There is nothing so easy as the creation and the cumulation

of fearful incidents after this fashion. If such creation and cumulation

be the beginning and the end of the novelist's work,--and novels have